WinToFlash – Make Bootable USB Drive, The Easy Way
Most of us do not like DVDs or other optical media, they get scratched and need a lot of space to keep. And sometimes the data written on them gets lost for no obvious reason. And writing them is another headache. Saying that USB drives do not have any of these disadvantages, they are small very fast compared to optical media and easy to copy the data onto them.
How to Install Windows 7 using a USB Hard disk
Earlier I wrote a tutorial on how to install Vista from a USB flash drive, the method given in that post worked for some and did not work for certain drives. Recently I tried to install Windows 7 the same way using a USB Hard disk but it didn’t work. So here’s a tutorial on how to use a USB hard disk to install windows 7 (its similar to Nam’s post a while ago) .
Why use a USB drive to install Windows 7?…
- Its faster than installing from a DVD
- Can be used without a DVD drive
- It does not require a blank DVD for every O/S version released.
Even though I used a USB HDD it should work on USB FDD’s as well. Also there will be the occasion when this method doesn’t work, then check the other method I have mentioned above.
Requirements
# A copy of windows 7
# A USB drive
How to
1. Right click Computer, select Manage, and Disk Management.
How to Boot/Install Vista from a USB Flash drive
There’s already an article about this on the site but since its not complete I’ll be writing this tutorial on how to create a bootable Vista installation USB flash drive.
Requirements
- A 4GB flash drive (I’ll be using a much lesser one here as I don’t have one)
- A Vista Installation DVD
- The bios must support booting with usb devices and it must be enabled. And boot priority must be set so that the Flash drive boots before the Fixed HDD
- A x86 usb bootable drive can only be created within a x86 operating system
- A x64 usb bootable drive can only be created within a x64 operating system
Important:Backup the USB flash drive as this will delete everything in it.
Instructions: Create bootable Flash drive
1. Plug the USB drive in
2. Open a command prompt window with administrator privileges.
3. Type diskpart and press enter
Change the number of processors used to start up your computer
Please note that to do this your processor must be multi core (Core2 Duo,Quad, dual Core?etc). What this tweak does is speed up the PC bootup time by using multiple processors.
1. In the start menu search area type ?msconfig? and press enter.
2. Now you should see the System Configuration window. and in that window select the ?Boot? tab.
3. Click the Advanced Options button.
