So, you’re downloading Windows 7 from one of the many places it is (or is soon to be) available. Or maybe you just don’t have an optical drive hooked up to your thin notebook, or you just want the install to go quickly. Whatever the reason, you want to install Windows 7 from a USB thumbdrive. No problem. All you have to do is:
1. Make your USB thumbdrive bootable.
2. Set your BIOS to boot from USB (or change the boot order so it tries the USB device first).
3. Extract and copy the entire contents of the .ISO file (I use WinRAR) or the whole contents of the DVD to the USB drive.
Then you just reboot with the USB drive in, and it’ll be just like you were installing off the DVD…only probably much faster, and a lot easier to carry around.
I’m going to skip parts 2 and 3 above. Every BIOS is different, so all I can say there is “look for the boot menu” and maybe “have your USB thumbdrive inserted when you start up your PC so the BIOS sees a drive there.” If you can’t dump files from the ISO (again, WinRAR or any program that opens up ISOs) or copy from the DVD, this advice might be a little above your comfort level.
So how to make a bootable USB thumbdrive? It’s simple.
First, format the drive. Just right-click it in Windows Explorer and choose Format. Go ahead and use NTFS, and Quick Format is fine.
Once that’s done, you’ll need to use a program called bootsect to add the filesystem bootcode. You can find bootsect.exe in the \boot\ directory of your Windows Vista or Windows 7 DVD, or you can download it. Fire up a command prompt (right-click and choose Run as administrator), go to the directory where bootsect is (such as D:\boot\ if you’re running it off your Windows Vista/7 DVD) and type the following:
bootsect /nt60 e:
Where e: is the drive letter of your USB thumbdrive. Be very careful about that. Do not type in the drive letter of one of your other drives, or you may make bad things happen. We’re telling it to add the filesystem bootcode sectors to our e: drive, for NTFS 6.0.
Now you have a USB thumbdrive that is ready to be booted. Of course, it doesn’t have any of the necessary boot files on it yet. If you tried to boot from it now, you’d get a “BOOTMGR is missing” type error. All you have to do now is copy all the files from within the Windows 7 ISO (not the ISO itself) or all the files from the DVD to your USB drive. Then make sure your BIOS is set to boot from USB, reboot, and install Win7.
This works for Vista, too. But you don’t want to install Vista, do you?
