Bootable USB media for Windows 7
For more information about the Windows Springboard Series visit http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8418918.
My first computer had a cassette drive; my next had two 5.25” floppy disk drives (which cost nearly as much as the computer). Going forward my next computers had both 5.25” and 3.5” drives, as well as a new invention called a hard drive. The floppy drives went HD, and soon CD and DVD drives came (and would progress from being read-only, to write once, to write many over the course of a decade). All the while the hard drives went from 10MB to HUGE… terabytes. Recently I ordered my first computer that has only a hard disk (a solid state drive to be specific) that will not have any disk drive of any sort… a netbook.
For most software I can simply copy it over the network, but how am I supposed to install an operating system onto it? I can do that over the network too (more on that later), but the simplest way is to use media that I can connect directly to the netbook.
I actually have a few choices; I can connect an external DVD-ROM drive to it, which would effectively double the weight of the ultra-light machine. However there is a much simpler way that also has the benefits of speeding our installation up immensely… installing from a high-speed USB key. This article will give you the simple steps to create that USB key.
Firstly most of us downloaded our Windows 7 RC (Build 7100) as an ISO file. Rather than burning it to a DVD I usually mount the ISO using a free tool called Magic ISO. This tool creates a virtual DVD drive for us, and assigns it a new drive letter, which we will have to know later so take note of it… let’s call it Drive W.
We need a USB key that is at least 4 Gigs. We are going to wipe it so make sure you don’t have anything important stored on it.
- Open a Command Shell (stop calling it a DOS window!) with elevated privileges. The elevated privileges are important later on.
- Type the command ‘DISKPART’ and press Enter.
- Make sure your USB key is connected and type LIST DISK into the Diskpart shell. Note the number of the USB key – in my case it was 1 but if you have multiple hard drives it will likely be different.
- Type SELECT DISK 1 (or the number you got from LIST DISK) and press Enter.
- Type CLEAN.
- Type CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY.
- Type ACTIVE.
- Type FORMAT FS=NTFS. (This might take a few minutes… you could as easily do a QUICK FORMAT)
- Type ASSIGN.
- Type Exit to close the Diskpart shell.
At this point we need to know what drive letter Windows assigned the USB key. For this example we will call it X:.
- Navigate to the BOOT directory of your Windows 7 disk (i.e.: W:\BOOT)
- Type BOOTSECT /NT60 X:
- Close the Command Prompt.
Once these steps are complete all that is left to do is to copy the entire contents of the Windows 7 disk onto the USB key… you could either use an XCOPY command, or do it within Windows Explorer.
That’s it! Your USB key is ready, and all you have to do is pop it into your workstation/laptop/netbook/tablet and boot up… remember that you must boot from the USB device though… you may have to set this in your BIOS, although for my Dell Inspiron Mini 9 all I did was press and hold 0 during boot to bring up the one-time boot menu.
One little gotcha… remember to create your USB stick with the right platform of Windows 7… so if your netbook has an x86 processor (most if not all of them do) then your x64 Windows 7 will not install… I won’t make THAT mistake again ;)
I hope this helps… in my next article in the series we will get a bit fancier and use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to create a USB deployment point that will include the application files and drivers!
For more information about the Windows Springboard Series visit http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=8418918.
Read the complete post at http://mitchgarvis.com/blogs/mitch/archive/2009/06/09/bootable-usb-media-for-windows-7.aspx