Installing Windows 7 through a USB Flash drive?

By crazlunatic
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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Proficient

Pootis Spencer

Posted
Posted

Been doing this too for a while. Works for USB external Hard drives too. Thats how mine is set up.

I created a 20GB partition and have all my OS's in nice neat folders on that partition. When I want to install an OS just cut and paste from the OS folder to the root and boot to it. Does not work for XP though still trying to find a nice os boot loader for that.

Grand Master

Izlude

Posted
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  Pikey said:
I found this site with some slightly different instructions .. with more detail about making the stick bootable ..

.. http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-...-working-guide/ ..

pikey oooh sorry i musta skipped your post up there. ok ya that's what im lookin ferz!!! :)

Mentor

Salty Wagyu

Posted
Posted
  Izlude said:
aww, it woulda been nice to be able to boot a USB stick and then install windows, not install from within existing windows.

What?

I thought this guide was for making a bootable USB install of Windows instead of DVD-R Media?

Proficient

darkmanx21

Posted
Posted

Yeah, you could do this with Vista also.

I haven't done it with Windows 7 but it shaved about 4 minutes when installing from a "high-speed" flash drive with Vista. When I tried to install it from an older Memorex flash drive it was, roughly, the same time as a DVD install. I actually prefer this way since it's easier to keep up with vs. DVD.

Sorry, I don't have any benchmarks, but it's so easy that I recommmend trying it for yourself next time you format.

Rookie

fro5tie

Posted
Posted
  Pikey said:
I found this site with some slightly different instructions .. with more detail about making the stick bootable ..

.. http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-...-working-guide/ ..

Just trying this now.

Any ideas why I was getting Invalid Partition Table error before?

Grand Master

SMELTN

Posted
Posted

I was reading Tim Sneath's The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets and seen 12. was Installing Win7 from a USB Memory Stick..

  Quote
Installing from a USB Memory Stick.

My wife has a Samsung NC10 netbook (very nice machine, by the way), and we wanted to install Windows 7 Beta on this machine to replace the pre-installed Windows XP environment. Like most netbook-class devices, this machine has no built-in media drive, and nor did I have an external USB DVD drive available to boot off. The solution: I took a spare 4GB USB 2.0 thumbdrive, reformatted it as FAT32, and simply copied the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO image to the memory stick using xcopy e:\ f:\ /e /f (where e: was the DVD drive and f: was the removable drive location). Not only was it easy to boot and install from the thumbdrive, it was also blindingly fast: quicker than the corresponding DVD install on my desktop machine.

I REALLY want to do this... But does anyone have the details on how to do this?

Grand Master

ToneKnee

Posted
Posted

Sorry, but there are quite a few topics talking about this already. Actually, there are several threads about it in this forum alone.

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...dows+7+from+usb

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...dows+7+from+usb

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...dows+7+from+usb

https://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?show...dows+7+from+usb

I'm going to ask a mod to stick this to stop this from getting out of hand. Thanx for the link though.

Mentor

Salty Wagyu

Posted
Posted

I don't know why the guy on that site says to only use xcopy, that's just rubbish info and certainly doesn't make the USB stick "bootable"

Folow one of those google links others posted, the instructions involving copying the full dvd to usb and using bootsect.exe to write boot info to it is what you'll need

Mentor

Pikey

Posted
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  aarste said:
I don't know why the guy on that site says to only use xcopy

The reason for xcopy is to remove the files read-only attribute. It may not be necessary in most cases, but it's handy for copying off of a cd or dvd drive .. some of the switches are useful too.

Experienced

thejohnnyq

Posted
Posted

I not only got this to work on some sticks for freinds, i also installed Win7 86/64 on my RIS server and installed several machines via it. Love that bootable network support.

One big thing i did find on some usb key fobs, is to use diskpart to create and format the drive seams to solve most of the issues over computer manager.

Grand Master

George P Global Moderator

Posted
  • Global Moderator
Posted

I guess 4 mins less with Vista might equal something like 5-8 with Win7? I'm just taking a guess but Win7 should install faster, and it does install less built in apps like mail, movie maker and so on, so that shaves off time.

Has anyone else been able to get this working yet?

Enthusiast

bagpus

Posted
Posted
  9UnknownMen said:
Would this theoretically work of SDHC card the same way? Dragging the files to it. No need to make it bootable?

No idea about SDHC, my usb pen is just a straight fat32 formatted pen. didnt use diskpart on it or any other fancy commands.

Grand Master

SMELTN

Posted
Posted

So I tried this last night.. But when my computer rebooted and went to read the usb drive it kept getting an error and wouldn't work.. I honestly dont remember what the error was but will try it again as soon as I get home.

I unzipped the ISO, then copy/pasted the contents from the iso onto the flash drive..

Neowinian

ranjith_ultimate

Posted
Posted

booting from usb is easy...never put iso image in usb drive...just open the iso image file and extract all to usb flash drive..use isodisk for extracting..

change boot options to usb hard drive and reboot...

it just installed windows 7 in 20 mins...

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