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.
Installing Windows 7 from a USB Drive: Newbie Guide
There have been a lot of installing Vista/Win7 via USB articles in the recent past, all using different types of methods. Now with Windows 7 round the corner and with the RC version being a success people have started to tryout Windows 7 and I’ve received a lot of mail, some stating it works and for some it doesn’t. Mainly there are responses about these methods being not easy to follow unless you have a fair knowledge about these stuff.
So in this tutorial I have used the easiest way to create a bootable USB that you can use to install Windows 7 (or Vista) and this will probably be the final post as well.
Creating the bootable USB drive:
Requirements
- An ISO Image of Windows 7 (any version)
- UltraISO (not free, but a trial version would do)
- A USB drive consisting more than 2.5GB (4GB drive is more than enough)
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
