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Turn any USB flash drive or HDD into a bootable Windows 7 installer
In November Long Zheng - all around smartypants and good guy - released a handy tutorial on turning the PDC hard drive that Windows 7 was being distributed on at the time into a bootable installer. As luck would have it, he discovered that the process works with any old drive.
It's a pretty simple procedure. Create an active partition on your USB drive if there's not one there already. Mount your Windows 7 iso with a utility like Daemon Tools Lite, and copy the complete contents of the "disc" onto your drive. That's it. Reboot and force your PC to boot to the USB device, and you should be ready to install.
You should be able to pull the same thing off with Vista as well by following the same steps.
Comments
17
Subscribe to commentsJoshJan 14th 2009 11:43AM
So does this mean that you'd be able to install it onto the hard drive and run it from there? I mean I know that this just says that you can use it to install Windows, as if it were a disc, but is that all it really does? You still have to install it onto your internal hard drive or not?
CameronJan 14th 2009 12:05PM
Even Easier:
1. Open CMD.exe
2. Type diskpart
3. Type listdisk
4. Type select disk # (# of your flash drive)
5. Type Clean, Create Partition Primary, Select Partition 1, Active, Format FS=FAT32, Assign
6. Extract the downloaded iso with 7ZIP and copy the extracted contents to the flash drive.
7. Boot from the flash drive.
MikeJan 14th 2009 2:18PM
http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=345
Completely idiot-proof instructions and the best ones to follow from any system.
If you downloaded the ISO and you open it with 7-zip, you'll see a folder with the name [BOOT] (i think). Ignore that one when copying over files. Most other programs that open ISOs don't show that folder, so no worries.
fantomJan 15th 2009 12:41AM
That only works on Vista not through Xp.
MikeJan 15th 2009 7:48AM
@fantom ....way to be a sheeple and read the title of the blog post!
diskpart is in xp
bootsect is in the Vista/W7 iso
Just ignore Step1-Part 2 if running under XP, and on Step2-Part1&2 just copy bootsect out of the iso/CD and cd to the folder you put it in and use it. Voila!
Fucking AO HellJan 14th 2009 12:06PM
Yup just an installer.
greggerJan 14th 2009 12:13PM
This works with Windows Server 2008 as well. Microsoft changed how the OS installers worked starting with Vista and Server 2k8. They work much more like XCOPY than what we used to see in Windows XP and before.
This is the easiest way to put Windows 7 on your MSI Wind / netbook. Works nicely on mine!
TTFN
JohnJan 14th 2009 12:34PM
Can anyone fill me in on how this works without copying the boot sector from the DVD to your USB drive?
kalJan 14th 2009 1:57PM
how can I do this with XP? I already have xp installed but i want to complete clean it and start over...either external HDD or USB only.
RandyJan 14th 2009 4:27PM
Anyway to do this on a Mac for a BootCamp install?
finnithJan 14th 2009 5:18PM
Is a 4GB drive enough?
El TacoJan 14th 2009 7:44PM
ya, it's about 2-3gb big
finnithJan 14th 2009 7:48PM
Thanks! Gonna start dling Windows 7 now
KimoeagleJan 16th 2009 11:57AM
I have been considering d/l Windows7 but do not want to blow my current OS (Vista64) out of the water or to scramble its brains (I have no Vista CDs to fall back on). I DO have 2 external HDDs (160G@), with the desktop a recent HP with 4G RAM and 500G HDD, using AMD Phenom 8450 triple-core chip.
In essence, I think that I have the horsepower, but I am wondering if I can install Windows7 on either one of my external HDs, or to perhaps mount it on an 8G thumb drive.
What say you??
KaiJan 25th 2009 5:36PM
Time to install windows 7. =O
randomMar 28th 2009 10:29PM
Will this let me go back to vista when I want to?
LooisMar 28th 2009 11:36AM
I was just looking for something like this to install Win7Rc. Thanks :D