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Saturday, July 23, 2011

Turn a USB thumb drive into a Windows 7 installation disk

If you need to install Windows 7 on a computer that has no DVD drive and you don't have a network connection to install from a shared DVD drive on another computer, you can install the OS from a USB thumb drive. Make sure it has plenty of free space for the installation files (I used a clean 32 GB drive). You will need to wipe everything on the drive so be sure to back up any data you have there to a different location. Here are the steps to follow to prepare the USB drive.


Insert the USB drive into a computer that does have a DVD drive.
Click Start and in the search box, type
 cmd
 and press CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER to open the command prompt with administrative
 privileges
At the command prompt, type
 diskpart
At the DISKPART> prompt, type
 list disk
Type
 select disk
 replacing  with the number of the USB disk from the list of disks
Type
 clean
Type
 create partition primary
Type
 active
Type
 format fs=fat32 quick
Type
 assign
Type
 exit
Type
 exit The above is not a typo. You need to type "exit" twice, once to exit the DISKPART utility and then again to close the command prompt.

 Now you can insert the Windows 7 installation disc and copy all files to the USB drive. To use it to install Windows 7, insert it in the computer where you want to install the OS, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from the USB drive first, and boot up to begin the Windows setup process.



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