How To Setup a USB Flash Drive to Install Windows 7

f you have a netbook and would like to upgrade it to Windows 7, you may be wondering how to do it without a clunky external DVD Drive. Today we show you how to install Windows 7 from a USB flash drive.

Installing Windows 7 from a flash drive is essentially the same as installing it from a DVD. Most of the work is setting up your flash drive so it becomes a bootable device with the OS on it. Here we will take a look at a couple of utilities that will allow you to easily create a bootable USB drive and copy Windows 7 to it.

Note: You’ll need a minimum of a 4GB flash drive to dedicate to the installation files.

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

If you have an ISO image of Windows 7, using Microsoft’s free utility is a quick and easy option to get the image on your USB flash drive. It requires XP SP2 or higher and if you’re using an XP machine you’ll need .NET Framework 2.0, and Microsoft Image Mastering API V2…both of which can be downloaded from the link below. It seemed to work best if I formatted the flash drive as NTFS before using the download tool. But that could be because of the flash drive I used…your mileage may vary.

It’s a pretty straight forward process, first browse to the location of your Windows 7 ISO file and click Next.

Select USB device…this also helps you burn the ISO to DVD as well if you need that option.

Choose your flash drive and click Begin copying.

Now just wait for the process to complete. The drive will be formatted and files copied to the flash drive.

When the process is finished you will be able to see the files on the flash drive as you would if you opened the installation disc. Now you can start the installation on any computer that allows you to boot from a USB drive.

WinToFlash

If you want to transfer a Windows 7 installation disc to USB…another super easy utility to use is WinToFlash. Just follow through the straight forward wizard, and you’ll be ready to install Windows 7 from your flash drive in no time.

The neat thing about this utility is it also offers different advanced features and tasks for other versions of Windows too.

It’s as easy as choosing the location of the Windows installation disc and the USB drive. Where in this example the DVD is drive (E:) and the flash drive is (F:). They recommend to turn off your Antivirus to increase the process speed, but we had MSE running on our machine and it didn’t seem to affect performance at all.

Next, you’ll need to agree to the Windows 7 EULA and hit continue.

Now just wait until the drive is formatted and the files are transferred over to the USB drive. The amount of time it takes will vary between systems. In our test it took around 10 minutes to complete over to an 8GB flash drive.

That’s it! Now the drive is ready so you can install Windows 7 on your netbook or any other computer that supports booting from a USB drive.

Conclusion

WinToFlash is still in Beta and doesn’t require installation to use. Microsoft’s tool apparently became Open Sourced recently, requires installation, and a few other requirements like .NET Framework. Both of these tools are free and each one works a bit differently, so you’ll need to decide which will work best in your situation. If you don’t want to manually create a bootable flash drive and copy the install files over, then you might want to check out these extremely simple to use utilities.

Download WinToFlash

Download Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

Create a Bootable Ubuntu USB Flash Drive

We’ve already covered how to use an Ubuntu Live CD to backup files from your dead Windows computer, but using the boot cd can sometimes be a little slow. We can speed up the booting process by installing Ubuntu to a bootable USB flash drive instead.

To accomplish this, we’ll use a tiny software package called UNetbootin, which is designed to make the installation process simple and easy.

Create the Bootable Flash Drive

You’ll first need to download the UNetbootin software and save it somewhere useful, since there’s no installation required, just double-click to run.

I chose to use an already downloaded ISO image of the Ubuntu installation cd, and then chose my flash drive, and clicked the OK button. Yes, this step is as simple as that.

The process will extract the files from the ISO image (or download them), copy them to the flash drive and then install the bootloader. Depending on what you are installing, this really doesn’t take very long.

Once the process is completed, you’ll be prompted to reboot… which you don’t necessarily have to do unless you want to test booting the flash drive on the same machine you are using.

Otherwise you can hit the Exit button.

Make Sure the Partition is Active

If you get a boot device error when you try and boot from the flash device, it could be that your partition is not marked as active. What we’ll do is use the command line diskpart utility to fix this… if you are in Vista open an administrator mode command prompt by right-clicking and choosing Run as Administrator.

Now you’ll need to run this command to figure out the number of your flash drive:

list disk

This will show you the list of drives, and you will use the disk number in the “select disk” command:

select disk 1

select partition 1

active

The “active” command will actually mark the current partition as active, which is why you need to select the disk and then the partition. At this point you should be done.

Booting From the Flash Drive

Now that you are all finished, you can try and boot from the flash drive. Every BIOS is different, but most of them will have a message like “Press F12 for the Boot Menu”, which is highly suggested. The boot menu will allow you to select the USB drive as the boot device. (apologies for the simply horrible camera phone screenshots)

Instead of the regular Ubuntu boot menu that you might be used to seeing, you will see the UNetbootin menu, which has essentially the same options.

Useful Note

If you are having issues booting Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) on a Dell machine, you might want to switch back to using Ubuntu 7.10 instead.

I was able to boot all the way into the desktop in about 35 seconds using the flash drive… way faster than using the regular live cd.

Stay tuned, we’re going to explore even more options for bootable CDs and USB drives that help you repair your computer

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Installing Windows XP from USB

The procedure here is provided without any warranty or support. It worked for me and so it might for you. Some of the procedures described here can wipe all of your data. Thought I’d warn you.

Step #1: Prepping BartPE
First we’ll prep the USB drive we’ll be using for booting. This is by far the largest step in the process, though it shouldn’t be difficult for anyone to follow. It requires a functional Windows system.
1.Download BartPE builder
2. Install BartPE. We’ll be assuming that you install to C:\pebuilder.
3. Start PE Builder from the Start Menu. Point “Source:” to the location of your Windows XP setup files containing SP3.

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Note: “Source:” is drive letter of your physical CD/DVD-ROM drive which is holding XP SP3 setup CD, a virtual drive mounted with XP SP3 ISO works as well

4. Make sure the “Output:” is set to “BartPE”.
5. Set “Media output” as “Craete ISO image” and filename as “c:\pebuilder\pebuilder.iso”
6. Hit “Build”.
7. When it’s done building, image file “c:\pebuilder\pebuilder.iso” should be created properly

Step #2: Creating bootable USB
1. Satrt UltraISO (V9.3 or newer version, download here)
2. Choose ‘File’->’Open’from main menu and open file “c:\pebuilder\pebuilder.iso”
3. Choose ‘Bootable’->’Write disk image’ from main menu
4.Insert the USB drive you intend to boot from
5. Choose proper “Write Method”,USB-HDD+ is recommanded
6. Hit “Write” to get a bootable USB drive
7. When it’s done, copy the Windows XP setup files to the USB drive. Please note that you’ll only need the i386 folder.

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If no errors occurred in the above process, you should now be all set to boot from USB!

Step #3: Configuring the BIOS
You should now reboot and go into the BIOS configuration to boot from USB. Instructions for doing so wildly from system to system, but generally entail the following:
1. Reboot the system.
2. While booting (before Windows starts loading), get into the BIOS configuration screen by hitting something like F1, F2, Delete or Escape. Hotkey instructions are generally provided on the screen.
3. Go to the section that contains your boot devices.
4. With your USB drive plugged in, the USB drive should be listed. If it isn’t, your system might not support booting from USB. Assuming that it is supported (as is the case with virtually all modern hardware), promote your USB drive to the primary boot device.
5. Exit from the BIOS configuration, saving all changes.
If you’re completely new to BIOS configuration, BIOS for Beginners over at Tom’s Hardware might be a good primer. Be aware though, that you can seriously screw up your system by providing incorrect settings!

Step #4: Booting into BartPE
Assuming that you properly configured your BIOS and your USB device supports booting, BartPE should now load. Depending on the speed of your USB device, this may take a while.
If it isn’t working, then double-check the following before making a scene:
• Is your BIOS properly configured for booting from the USB disk? (Is the USB device listed and does it have top priority?)
• Have you correctly prepared the USB disk in step two? (Restart the procedure.)
• Does your USB stick properly support being booted from? (Try another one!)

Step #5: Prepping the Hard Disk
You need to make sure that your hard drive is partitioned and formatted properly. Especially if you’ve had Linux or some other operating system on it, you’ll need to repartition and format it. BartPE contains DiskPart for disk partitioning and A43 File Manager to format your drive.

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If you are sure that your hard drive is set up properly (i.e. it has only run Windows, it contains a valid FAT or NTFS partition) then you can safe yourself the hassle and skip this step.

This procedure will destroy any data on the hard drive.
To repartition:
1. From the Go menu, navigate to DiskPart.
2. Enter the commands needed to repartition your drive. For example, try the following: select disk 0 (select the first disk), clean (purges the entire drive, essentially resetting it), create partition primary (creates a single partition from the entire disk), assign (assign the partition a drive letter), exit (quits DiskPart).
This procedure will destroy any data on the hard drive.
To format:
1. From the Go menu, navigate to the A43 File Manager.
2. Right-click on the target drive (e.g. C:) and click Format. Should be self-explanatory.

Step #6: Launching Windows XP Setup from USB
With your drive all ready, you can now launch the Windows XP setup with a few custom parameters. Let’s assume that the files are available at X:\i386.

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Plugging in a device now won’t work. Remember that all USB devices will need to be plugged in right from the start while using BartPE.

1. Run the following command:
X:\i386\winnt32.exe /syspart:C: /tempdrive:C: /makelocalsource /noreboot

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Note: Replace “/tempdrive:C:” with the drive which has enough space to hold windows setup files, you may change the partition which you want to install Windows to at next step #7.

2. Proceed with the installation. When asked to convert the installation volume to NTFS, answer No. The setup program incorrectly believes that your USB drive (which is formatted as FAT) needs conversion.
3. The setup program will then silently close, which might make you think that something went wrong. Don’t worry though.

Step #7: Continue Windows XP Setup from Harddisk
1. Reboot your system
2. Unplug USB drive during post stage
3. Change your BIOS setting back to boot from hard disk again as needed
4. You can now continue to finish setting up Windows XP.

Congratulations

source!