Discussion on:

Configure a USB flash drive to be a Windows 7 installation platform

Have you ever wanted to be able to install an operating system from a USB flash drive? Now that you know how to do it, are you likely to employ this technique to install Windows 7 on a Netbook or on multiple computers?

I would like to know about licensing. Is it the same as with XP in that you have to use the same license as the installation disk? Or is Win 7 going to be more forgiving? This article kind of abandoned those issues. C'mon, give us the good stuff.

...obviously you have to have a multiple licenses, such as with the Family Pack or some other multiple licensing package, in order to install Windows 7 on multiple systems.

I mentioned the Family Pack as an example in the article, but figured that everyone would know that the days of W2K and prior OSs, where you could essentially install one license on many systems, was gone.

Sorry...

If I have already installed a single license version of Windows 7, I won't be able to create a bootable version of Windows 7 on my flash drive?

The Diskpart utility in Windows XP will not setup the partition on the USB drive. You must create it from a Windows Vista / 7 / WinPE 2.x environment or use a third party tool to create the partition on the flash drive.

... I should have been more specific. I apologize for any confusion.

You must use the DiskPart command in Vista or in 7 as the DiskPart command in XP can not be used to set up a partition on the USB drive.

I have updated the article to include this information!

Peter,

That was the first thing that I thought of when I read this write-up (which is excellent save this omission).

Also really important for anyone trying this - selecting the right disk is important when using the DISKPART utility. This may sound obvious, but in any write-up, anything that may wipe out a perfectly good drive with a typo needs to be put in bold letters and in flashing neon if possible.
If I am creating a bootable USB drive (and I have done several for installers and for recovery drives) I use a computer with removable hard drive trays - turn off/remove the drives with the good data on them, and only boot to a PE 2.0 disk. I have another USB key for this purpose. If I accidentally delete the contents of the USB key, this is not an issue since I have the PE 2.0 image backed up and nothing is lost.

Call me paranoid - but you are only paranoid if they aren't really out to get you...

Cheers,

Chris in Snellville GA - Where Everybody's Somebody

... you are about to format a disk.

The article did list 2 ways to help readers indentify the USB drive: List Disk and List Volume, which give more detailed information to help you identify the correct drive.

However, I did add a section to the article about making sure that you select the correct drive.

I also updated the Using the DiskPart utility section of the article to specify that Windows XP's DiskPart command is unable to create a bootable USB flash drive.

Thanks for your valuable feedback!

Neither I nor TechRepublic nor Windows 7 Forums members have found the reason for one of my computers refusing to boot to DVD, even after my having gone through the correct procedure to change the boot order for that to happen, several times. My question then is, can I prepare a flash drive on a Windows 7 m/c for installing Win7 to a separate drive on one of my XP m/c's, to see if that will do the install?

. . . as with my previous efforts with the CD drive, BIOS will not boot from the flash drive. Looks like it's no-go for my hopes of dual-booting from two separate HDDs, my only option now a clean install and hope that my programmes (Adobe Creative Suite, mainly) will run on it. I'll check out Adobe for the possibility of its programmes doing so. I suppose I could install them to my Win7 laptop and hope Adobe will allow me to run them on what would be a third installation.

Thanks to all who contributed. And thanks to Greg Schulz for his most excellent demonstration on how to create a partition to a flash drive. So clear. Thanks, Greg.

I have W7 on one of my PCs. To save it for posterity can I gost it to a USB drive, or a spare empty stand alone drive? And would a gosted drive so created be bootable?

ia nih ge juga mw kalo ada yang punya windows 7?

You took the words right out of my mouth.
You really need to use spell check.

1) It's a two-year-old post.

2) The poster is Indonesian. Remember, this is an international forum with no specified official language.

If I prepared a drive with Vista up to the point of dragging the OS files to the drive and drag and drop files from XP instead of Vista/7, is there any reason this wouldn't work? Sure would speed up a reload!

I've not tried an fresh INSTALL of XP from a flash drive, and it's too late in the game to spend the time on, ( That Win 7 thing about to happen) but it might work.

Concerning restoring a system.
Though in a different area of interest..

You would need WinPE on the flash drive to accomplish a capture, and later restore, your system. I would recommend an external drive to capture the existing system. The base image for XP ( OS Only) is about 2.5 GB.
Add your progs and data files and it grows quickly.

I have shop and do a fair bit of reloading XP from scratch for my clients. I have disks that I use, but thought it would be easier.

When I tried to prep my USB stick with Vista and dump on the XP disk files, it wouldn't work to reinstall the OS. Fun to try, though. I made a drive with Vista and a bunch of stuff I have to reinstall all the time; Adobe reader, Java, AV, etc.

Great stuff!

Couldn't you use the Disk Management Console (Diskmgmt.msc)on a Vista machine to prepare the flash drive? Seems like it would be much easier to identify the correct drive with the GUI and therefore much less chance of destroying an OS with a typo.

Am about to install Windows 7 on my HP Mini Netbook (2GB-ram) using a USB thumb drive.
JackNZ.

i have tried with GUI console to prepare the disk, what you need is to run "bootsect.exe /nt60 x:" to set it compatible with nt6. it works..

When setting up Windows 7 from USB device everytime Windows 7 shutsdown during by itself during setup , when it reboots it wants to reinstall windows seven again.

Do you have a fix for this?

Hi there I know its a long time ago but I just recently had the same problem... Can you remember how you solved this?
Thanks

What on the opposite: To get Windows seven installed to a bootable USB drive, so I can use it with any computer?

HDDs simply for apps and storage.

may take care of it. It's supposed to be a lot faster than USB 2. The slow speed is what is detering me from using a bootable flash drive.

...interface, once it is available.

If you are interested, you can learn more about USB 3 in Everything USB's

SuperSpeed USB 3.0 FAQ
http://www.everythingusb.com/superspeed-usb.html

Greg. I think that USB 3 will be the ants pants when it's available. The PE environment should fly on USB 3.

Want to try out some ideas of running an O/S via flash and apps also on flash.

I find that all of my flash drives read quickly but write slowly. I'm sure that USB3 wron't speed up the write times, but maybe the read times...

On a related note, installing Windows 7 in Virtual PC 2007 is painfully, painfully slow using an attached DVD disk. It's much faster to make an ISO of the disk and have Virtual PC install Windows 7 from the attached ISO image. It takes about 1/20th of the time.

SDD - Solid State Drives ie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs - this youtube is a real laugh. Some Brits with too much money (or good connections) RAIDed 24 SSD drives, 6TB, onto one high end DIY PC.

0.5 seconds to load all 6 Office apps, 18 seconds to load all 53 programs in the start menu. They don't mention windows boot time.

SSD is not yet cheap, and recently there was a problem with a recall on some SSD's. But SSD is here to stay and it won't be too long before you see them as an option offered by most PC builders.

So simple when someone shows you how! I discovered another way recently when I couldn't make the HP utility work. I use Bootit NG (google it) for multi booting and partition work so decided to just treat the USB drive like a normal drive by deleting the partition, creating a new one, formatting it and making it active. Similar to your method but all point and click.

...you have to shell out $34.95 to get Bootit NG.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure the Bootit NG is a fantastic utility and can see how it would be appealing to be able to perform the entire procedure from a GUI.

However, I'm generally opposed to purchasing additional software that does something the the operating system can already do just fine on its own. (Of course, there situations where this isn't the case.)

Nonetheless, if you are are reading this and would be interested, I could create a little GUI based script that would automate the entire procedure.

If you would like to see such a script, just drop a note here in the Discussion area titled "Please Create a Script"

I don't like paying either but I found this software so useful I was happy to pay for it.

I would love to see your script. I was aware that Diskpar supports scripting and would find it useful to learn more.

It is a pity MS did not see fit to include a utility or easier way of making a bootable USB in Windows 7. Diskpart is not something the average user would find easy or safe to use.

Thanks for the article.

How soon shall we expect it?

Please Create a Script

I think its a good idea but can u tell me how to install it into a usb and not from it. since if my pc gets down i need not format it and can access it through my usb windows

I was able to do this successfully from Vista but not from an XP PC.

... I should have been more specific. I apologize for any confusion.

You must use the DiskPart command in Vista or in 7 as the DiskPart command in XP can not be used to set up a partition on the USB drive.

I added this information to the article.

Why configure the USB drive as FAT32?
Is there a problem with NTFS?
Is there an advantage in formating NTFS?

Thanks in advance,
Oded Szpiro CITP, London UK

The most compelling reason for formatting a USB flash drive with FAT32 instead of NTFS is "abrupt pull" factor.

Many folks have a tendency to yank a USB flash drive out of the port as soon as they are done with it rather than using the Safely Remove Hardware method. FAT32 is more forgiving of this type of termination than NTFS is.

If you yank out an NTFS drive that has not yet completed working with the files on the USB flash drive, you could very well end up with corrupted data.

Chances are that would not happen in this particular scenario since you aren't really writing to the disk; however, as a general rule using FAT32 on a drive that will likely be connected and removed regularly is just a safer bet in my book.

Dear Mr. Shultz,

Thank you for the answer and the explanation.

Regards,
Oded Szpiro, London UK

Just found yet more methods :-

http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm

i never knew it is this easy to configure.thanks greg you are a genuis
chima mike

I'm glad you reminded me of the Diskpart Util. I had completely forgot about that, using third party utilities spoils a person, and it isn't always the most efficient way to do things either. It is always good to remember the command line.

This technique works great. I had a DVD drive fail in a laptop and needed to reimage it. Just boot it up and away it goes!

This technique I've found works for installing Windows Vista, Server 2008, 7 and Server 2008 R2.

Another area where I found this works as well is with my company's "gold disk" builds. These are pre-built OS installations with pre-installed drivers, applications, AV software, etc., all of which get installed through the WAIK/Windows PE. Some of these are larger than a single-layer DVD so a larger flash drive is needed, but it still works. Long story short, if you get all of the files from the installation medium copied to the flash drive, and you configured it as Greg noted above with diskpart, it should work.