can you boot off a usb if you copy files directly to it?

well i have to reinstall windows on my pc. im using a chrome book right now and for some reason when i burn disk images using the recovery utility i cant boot off of the usb. if i extract the files from the iso and copy the files from the extracted iso folder, can i boot from the usb?

 

No, the USB has to be flagged as bootable.

I usually use this to do that. It is free and works well. Unfortunately, you can not do this with a Chromebook.
Rufus - The Official Website (Download, New Releases)

 

yeah rufus is the best. when you burn an image on a chromebook, you have to change the end from iso/img to bin. i think that has something to do with it