Boot and Install Windows from a USB thumb drive

Question

Installing Windows from a thumb drive is vastly superior to burning a copy to a DVD which will fill some landfill somewhere with toxic stuff. Not to mention it's about 50x faster to install Windows from a USB Thumb Drive.

How do you get the bits onto the thumb drive so that you can boot from it and do a clean install?

Answer 1

Update: Microsoft has created the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool to make this very easy.

I used this guide as a set of directions

http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry

The steps are really longer than necessary. You need to:

1. Get a fast 4GB or larger USB Thumbdrive. Corsair drives are fast and cheap.

2. run cmd.exe and enter the following commands followed by enter

1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk 1 (select your usb disk which number you have determined in step 2)
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=ntfs quick
9. assign
10. exit

3. copy the Windows sources from the CD or other source using robocopy

robocopy.exe E:\ F:\ /MIR

where E:\ is the source and F:\ is the destination (thumbdrive)

Configure your PC to boot from the USB drive

This is the tricky part. For most of the machines I've tried the USB Thumbdrive will apppear to the BIOS as any other hard drive. You need to muck with the boot sequence to place the thumbdrive higher in the boot order that the local hard drive.

Note that after you do this you might want to reset the boot order in order to ensure that BitLocker doesn't detect boot changes based on the fact that the thumdrive is missing if it was there when you encrypted your drive.

Answer 2

I found two problems with the accepted answer:

1. It assumes the usb drive is disk 1 for DISKPART.
   This can be resolved by using the LIST DISK command prior to SELECT DISK # to determine the correct disk number.

2. The usb drive did not appear as a bootable device to the target machine.
   This can be fixed by running the bootsect utility off the Windows installation DVD.
   

   Before copying the contents of the Windows DVD:

   1. Run cmd.exe as Administrator
   2. Select your optical drive (assumed to be D:)
   3. Type CD boot
   4. Type D:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 U: (where U: is your USB drive)

Adding these extra steps I was able to install Windows 7 from a USB HDD onto a Samsung NC10 Netbook.

If this proves unsuccessful some other techniques (including the accepted answer with the above steps) can be found at http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm.

Answer 3

Quick tip I hope will help people going through the same pain as me when trying to create a thumb drive for Windows Server 2008

I had an old USB led around, but it wouldn't mount for me to run diskpart on it.

Turns out it was formatted in FAT16. Mount it on a laptop with a proper OS, reformat it to FAT32, then plug it back into the Windows Server 2008 box and it mounts. Then run diskpart as above.

Answer 4

The chances of your USB drive being disk 1 are less then 1%. After opening diskpart make sure you do a list of your drives/disks and confirm which number it is before you follow any of these steps.