Installing Windows 7 from a USB key

Microsoft has announced that it will support Windows 7 installations from a USB key. This will allow people to install Windows 7 on systems that do not have a DVD drive (yes, Windows 7 will also run quite fast on your old notebook that only has 1Gb of RAM and does not have a DVD player), but it will also speed up the installation process (because installing from USB is faster than installing from DVD)

Dennis Chung, IT Pro Evangelist at Microsoft, has published a video, demonstrating how easy it is to prepare the USB and use it to install Windows 7. You can watch the video below (or from here )

In short, the procedure to prepare the key consists of the following steps :

• On a Vista computer that will be used to prepare the USB stick, install Diskpart 

(you must run the diskpart preparation on a Vista computer, because diskpart on XP will not show USB drives)

• Run diskpart and from the diskpart command line, enter the following commands :
  • list disk       (to show the status of your disks)
  • select disk 1           (where 1 is the corresponding number of your USB drive)
  • clean
  • create partition primary
  • active
  • format fs=fat32 quick
  • assign      (give the USB drive a drive letter)
• Copy the Windows 7 installation DVD to the USB drive
• Remove the USB drive.  Put the USB drive in the system where you want to install Windows 7 and boot from USB

That’s it

---

Similar/Related posts:

Open a command prompt with system rights in Vista (and XP) Icons Shortcuts and SendTo items in Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008 Windows 7 Beta vs Release Candidate Securing Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory IPSec VPN between Windows Server 2008 and Juniper ScreenOS