Now available on Technet and MSDN – RC of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2

Hopefully the title is self evident. The servers are taking a real pasting right now, so you might find it best to give it a little while for things to calm down

Now if you want to install machines quickly you can copy the contents of the DVD to a BOOTABLE USB stick (disks should work too) and I posted instructions on how to make one bootable for vista back in 2006 and the same steps seem to work

select disk 1 {or the number of your USB key, be careful !}

clean  {Like I said, be careful ! This erases the disk}

create partition primary

select partition 1

active

format fs=fat32 {see below}

assign

exit

Although the instructions above say FAT 32 I’ve formatted my stick as NTFS so I can store files on it – someone was kind enough to send me a 16GB with a bunch of VHDs on it, I’m not sure if any of the WIM files in Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2 are too large for the stick. Update: you can specify recommended instead of FS=fat32 and this seems to work – again I haven’t checked but this may use exfat which wasn’t around in 2006.

Once you have a bootable stick you can put Xcopy the DVD files to it and use it to speed up the installation if you are trying to build multiple boxes.

I’ve been copying files I use for installing software off this machine, and the next step is to run the easy transfer wizard to whisk my files off the machine so I can bring them back quickly …

(It says don’t use your computer, so here’s hoping that making a blog post doesn’t break anything)