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kyle2020
Guest
Alright guys, heres a quick, easy way to make your USB thumb / flash drive capable of installing Windows 7, cutting out the need for a disc!
First off, you need a 4GB or higher capacity flash drive - ill be using my 8GB Freecom drive, as its the largest I own.
So, to kick things off, we need to open the command line, or cmd.exe for vista users using the search feature
Then we need to start up DiskPart, simply by typing "diskpart" and hitting enter:
We will the need to find the discs available to be used by DiskPart - to do this we type "list disk"
So now we have a table of available drives - disc 0 in my case is my samsung spinpoint and disc 2 my thumb drive - you will need to figure out which is your USB drive by the size table.
Next, we need to select that disc by typing "select disc #" - the hash being the number of your drive - in my case, I would enter "select disc 2". Then, after the drive is selected, we need to type "clean"
DiskPart will scrub the chosen drive clean for us, ready for the windows install files.
However, before we learn to run we must crawl - to do this we simply type "create partition primary" - this will format the disc, making it usable for our purpose
We then enter "active"
And heres the bit that requires a bit of typing. You will now need to type "format fs=fat32 quick" to format the drive as fat32, making it bootable so that we can install our OS from it
Our second to last step simply involves typing "assign"
And then, finally, no more than 5 minutes down the line, we copy and paste all the OS files - in my case, im copying all the files from my copy of Windows 7 build 7068 (thanks alex ) to the drive
After setting the primary boot media to your USB drive in your bios, your all set!
Advantages?
1. Faster installation times
2. No use of discs! saves money and reusable time after time!
3. Takes no more than 5 minutes to set up, so time effective in comparison with burning a disc.
4. Silent install. No disc spinning up. No annoyance. Do it whilst your sleeping for all I care
5. Did I mention there's no cost of discs involved?!
First off, you need a 4GB or higher capacity flash drive - ill be using my 8GB Freecom drive, as its the largest I own.
So, to kick things off, we need to open the command line, or cmd.exe for vista users using the search feature
Then we need to start up DiskPart, simply by typing "diskpart" and hitting enter:
We will the need to find the discs available to be used by DiskPart - to do this we type "list disk"
So now we have a table of available drives - disc 0 in my case is my samsung spinpoint and disc 2 my thumb drive - you will need to figure out which is your USB drive by the size table.
Next, we need to select that disc by typing "select disc #" - the hash being the number of your drive - in my case, I would enter "select disc 2". Then, after the drive is selected, we need to type "clean"
DiskPart will scrub the chosen drive clean for us, ready for the windows install files.
However, before we learn to run we must crawl - to do this we simply type "create partition primary" - this will format the disc, making it usable for our purpose
We then enter "active"
And heres the bit that requires a bit of typing. You will now need to type "format fs=fat32 quick" to format the drive as fat32, making it bootable so that we can install our OS from it
Our second to last step simply involves typing "assign"
And then, finally, no more than 5 minutes down the line, we copy and paste all the OS files - in my case, im copying all the files from my copy of Windows 7 build 7068 (thanks alex ) to the drive
After setting the primary boot media to your USB drive in your bios, your all set!
Advantages?
1. Faster installation times
2. No use of discs! saves money and reusable time after time!
3. Takes no more than 5 minutes to set up, so time effective in comparison with burning a disc.
4. Silent install. No disc spinning up. No annoyance. Do it whilst your sleeping for all I care
5. Did I mention there's no cost of discs involved?!
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