Windows 7, I’m sure you have heard of it by now. Already Microsoft has a new operating system, hopefully this one won’t be a disaster like Vista was. If you installed Vista or even later versions of XP from a DVD you know that it was very time consuming. Why not speed up the process by using a flash drive to install Windows 7. Windows 7 is currently in beta and Microsoft is offering it free to anyone to try out until August. In this article we will show you how to take the Windows 7 ISO and put it on a USB flash drive for fast and easy installation.
Ok so the first thing you are going to want to do is get the Windows 7 ISO. Microsoft is no longer offering it from their website, but there are sure a lot of other places you can get it at. Also if you have a Windows 7 DVD this guide will work with it as well. After you have the Windows 7 ISO you need to mount either burn it to a DVD or mount it. I had the ISO already so I just decided to mount it using Daemon Tools. Once it is mounted make sure you remember the drive letter.
Next we want to prepare our flash drive. The Windows 7 ISO is about 2.5GB so you will need a flash drive at least 4GB in size. I am using an 8GB flash drive I got from BFG during CES. Once you have your flash drive plug it into your computer and also make sure you remember the drive number. Now open up command prompt and type: diskpart
This will open up a new command window. No if you are like me you have many USB drives and card readers connected so you want to list your drives so you know what drive your connected USB drive is. To do that type: list disk
This will list all of your connected drives or card reader drives. Now identify your flash drive, for us it is drive 13.
Now select the drive by typing: select disk 13 Now run the following commands…
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit
Now what we did there was create a primary partition on the flash drive, make it the active partition, and format it with the FAT32 file system. Simple enough right?
Now we have to copy the files from the Windows 7 ISO or DVD. So either put the DVD in the drive or mount the image you have. As I said before make sure you know the drive letters of your flash drive and of the DVD drive you are using. Now open command prompt back up and type in this:
xcopy j:*.* /s/e/f r:
Now in this sequence the J: drive is our mounted DVD drive and R: is our flash drive. The drive letters will vary for you of course. One you type the command in and press enter you will see all of the files being copied, just wait till it is completed and you will have a bootable Windows 7 flash drive!
There is one more thing you are going to have to do to get this to work. You are going to need to go into the BIOS of your laptop and make the first bootable device the USB drive. This was very easy to do on my Dell XPS M1210. After that you are good to go, so just plug in your flash drive and install Windows 7.
Not only is this method convenient (carrying a flash drive is better than a DVD), it is much, much faster than installing from a DVD. This guide not only works with Windows 7 but will also work for Vista as well. Hope this guide has made installing a new operating system easier, stay tuned for more Windows 7 related articles.
If the battery usage time is too long, power may be too short, we can be alone for the computer on battery power until the battery remaining 10%, then non-stop charging, so that alone can increase the battery life.
There is one more thing you are going to have to do to get this to work. You are going to need to go into the BIOS of your laptop and make the first bootable device the USB drive. This was very easy to do on my Dell XPS M1210. After that you are good to go, so just plug in your flash drive and install Windows 7.
Thank you. exactly what i needed.
This was awesome!!!! It worked….thank you so much!!!!
Thanks
i tried this pattern but didn't worked out for me. But I find a solution by downloading iso and some microsoft intaller that will convert iso into a bootable usb installer of windows 7.But ey, atleast this post gave me an idea that it is possible.
xcopy is deprecated. instead the command “robocopy j: r: /s /e” should be used
With the iPhone or iPod Touch, I can understand the lack of a built in stand as the device is small and most are not using it for extended periods of time. But the whole point of the iPad is to use it for interactive applications like video, share it with others.
With the iPhone or iPod Touch, I can understand the lack of a built in stand as the device is small and most are not using it for extended periods of time. But the whole point of the iPad is to use it for interactive applications like video, share it with others.
Wootsauce was just looking for something like this! thanks!
Just done this on my sandisk cruzer 16Gb, lol! took a bit of time to format hahaha! but worked. I was getting the most annoying windows 7 error code 0x80070570.
Cheers dude gonna get a small 4Gb and put windows 7 on there permanently.
thank you for screwing up my 16 GB flash drive…its unusable and a computer shop cant fix it. shoot there goes 80 buck down the drain. STRANGER DANGER. DO NOT USE ON LARGE DRIVES OR DRIVES THAT YOU NORMALLY USE
I just did this on a 16GB drive and it worked fine. There is nothing in this guide that would actually make a drive unusable, seems like your drive died…
Useful articles,.. keep share
Well , the view of the passage is totally correct ,your details is really reasonable and you guy give us valuable informative post, I totally agree the standpoint of upstairs. I often surfing on this forum when I m free and I find there are so much good information we can learn in this forum!
The strange thing in this process is that you've never copied boot code from to DVD to flash drive. I guess it's format command that writes some kind of default bootsector to the active partition. that's why this method works.
nice article btw, thx
it worked flawlessly for me with fat32. only I had to format it under win7, while win xp format rendered it unbootable. I even applied nt60 bootsector to xp formatted fat32 flash drive and nothing different happened. maybe xp's format creates no bootsector for removable flash drives?!
good share for install windows7 for my computer netbook.
for people like Johngetter who say that there flash drive got knocked down to only a few megabytes when it used to be 16 gigs, you simply messed up somewhere and messed up the main partion. This can be simply fixed with a program such as parted magic from linux here: http://download.cnet.com/Parted-Magic-LiveCD/30…
you really cant destroy a flash drive, most likely if this doesnt fix it your flash drive simply died or your flaming this post with lies.
how much time will take for copying the window in flash drive
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Actually this method works if your current Os is windows 7 I guess.Otherwise you may either have to use Microsoft method or Use Utilities like WintoFlash as given here:http://sunil-bhaskar.blogspot.com/2010/08/windows-7-installation-from-usbflash.html
tnx men,,
Good tutorial. I took a screen shot of it because you have auto-refresh on.
Very cheap way of getting more pageviews when you know it will refresh a few times during the process.
Thank you for a great guide, installed it on a 16gb drive and works perfect 🙂
Thanks for the guide! Worked out well!
Only one thing: You should mention that one should change the boot position after the first reboot otherwise it tries to start the installation of Windows 7 again from the beginning.
I tried doing this on a windows 7 machine and when i get to the xcopy command i get an access denied error. I am running cmd as administrator and my drive letters are correct. I googled, but couldn’t find anything that worked.
Thank you very much!
Great guide!!
Thank you very much!
Great guide!!
i had that problem when i was trying to use diskpart with xp. i had to use my parents computer which already has windows 7 on it becase xp didnt recognise my thumb drive in list disk
Thank you for sharing this awesome guide. Now I have windows 7 on my USB.
i really need some help if anyone is still watching this thread
ive done everything right but when i get up to the xcopy J thing it goes fine but stops on like 179 files copied saying accies denied
anyone please help me!?
Great article! It’s my first time to know that we can install Windows 7 from a usb flash Drive. This is a very useful information to me. Thanks for sharing!
Just what the doctor ordered. Thank you very much. I’ll try it now. 🙂
Great deals for usb flash drive. Thanks for sharing so clear and detail steps of installing Windows 7 with usb flash drives. I learn a lot from this article!
Excellent article, The steps of installing Windows 7 from a usb flash drive seem very complicated, But After reading this article, I can understand the details easily.
Great article! I have heard of Windows 7 and knew about it a year ago. But I didn’t know how to install it from a usb flash drive until read this article. It’s worth for us to learn!
what if i want to use it as a memory stick not install os can i just format it again or what
thank u
My PC fails to detect any OS CD/DVD what might be the problem?
thanx a LOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
then hows that you solved this problem……..{ Actully it didnt help, list disk doesnt show any of my usb disks, only my real HDD } get answer
.during this installetion I was getting the most annoying windows 7 error code 0x80070570.
Then you can’t do a full format of your drive.. its a tempory option but once you got that back up you should really burn it and reformat
How long can a USB Flash drive sustain running an operating system?
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Thanks useful stuff.
Cool tips ^^