My Piece of the Inter(.)net » Flash Drives http://mypieceoftheinter.net A place for my geekish ramblings or whatever I find interesting. Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:35:03 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.3 Installing Windows 7 From a Flash Drive http://mypieceoftheinter.net/archives/1998 http://mypieceoftheinter.net/archives/1998#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:10:39 +0000 David McGrath http://mypieceoftheinter.net/archives/1998 If you have a copy of Windows 7 installation media as an ISO (disk image) you may want to put it on a flash drive.  You might think that you’d be able to just click and drag the file onto the flash drive and be done, but that isn’t the case!  Here’s how to do it

First, have a Windows 7 ISO (duh)

Next, download and install Microsoft’s ISO tool here. (That is a direct link, originally found the link here.  If you’re doing this on Windows XP, go to that page and scroll down to “For Windows XP Users” to find two more downloads you will need.)

When you open the program, it will look like this.
Windows 7 Flash Drive 1

Click “Browse”.

Windows 7 Flash Drive 2

Select the ISO file and click “Open”.

Windows 7 Flash Drive 3

Click “Next”

Windows 7 Flash Drive 4

Click “USB device”.

Windows 7 Flash Drive 5

Select the drive you want.  Make sure you don’t have any data on it that you want to keep!  Click “Begin copying” and wait for the process to finish.

Windows 7 Flash Drive 6

Windows 7 Flash Drive 7

Windows 7 Flash Drive 8

Windows 7 Flash Drive 9

Congratulations!  You now have a Windows 7 installation hard drive.  You will still probably have to do some fancy stuff in the BIOS to get the computer to look at the flash drive while the system is starting up.

This isn’t necessary, but I like to put a copy of the original ISO on the flash drive.
Windows 7 Flash Drive 10

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