Install Windows 7 from USB Stick (No more burning on DVD Media)

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Windows 7 RC has come out and most of you must be looking at possibilities of installing and playing with the new gen Windows OS as I was till yesterday! A big pain in this entire process is first download the image from the site and then burn it on a DVD.

Fortunately Windows 7 removed one of those pains and allowed us to install directly from a USB Stick. A very nice article is already published on the same which you might have already seen (TechNet Magazine).

I tested the same and it’s really amazing so including it here for your reference:

  • First, you’ll need the DiskPart utility on the system you will use to prep the thumb drive. This is a free disk partitioning utility that is likely already installed on your Windows system. If not, you can download DiskPart here.
  • Launch the DiskPart utility by typing diskpart at the Start Menu.
  • Then run the list disk command to check the status of your drive.
  • Now run select disk 1 where the "1" is actually the corresponding number of your USB drive.
  • Run clean.
  • Once the thumb drive is clean, you can run create partition primary.
  • Now make the partition active by entering active
  • Then you need to set up the file system as Fat32 by running format fs=fat32 quick (quick, of course, specifies that you want to perform a quick format to speed up the process).
  • Entering the assign command gives the USB drive a drive letter, making it easy to access from Windows Explorer
  • Then you can copy everything from the Windows 7 installation DVD onto the USB key (a simple drag and drop will do).

That’s it…..now you can insert the thumb drive into the system you want to install Windows 7 onto and boot the system. The installation will now proceed as usual—but really much faster. So enjoy Windows 7 experience.