Install Windows from a USB Memory Stick

You may have read a post of mine last year about when I tried to install Windows 7 on my laptop, but got an error about requiring a driver for the DVD reader - an impossible situation which would never be fixed with a driver.

After doing some thinking, I've come to the conclusion that it was most likely caused by the Windows 7 ISO being burnt to disk using a DVD-RW drive that was different to the one being used to later install Windows 7 (the disk was created on one machine but used on another). I'm quite disappointed that a Sony DVD-RW drive would create a disk that cannot be read by other drives, but from asking around it's not an uncommon thing for burning installation disks. So here's a "new" way of doing things: use a USB memory stick to create an installation "disk" of Windows (or any other program, operating system or whatever).

The advantages to this are simple; you'll avoid the incompatibilities that seem to occur between different DVD-RW drives, and in addition, the USB interface is quicker than the optical disk interface, so your installation will go much faster.

The steps to do this are quite simple, but you'll have to watch out if you want to do this to install Windows XP, as it might not have USB drivers that work with your motherboard pre-service-pack 2. Windows 7 or Vista, and any applications, should install fine however.

The first thing to do is to acquire a USB stick. I recommend an 8GB stick, as the capacity of a single sided DVD is over 4GB - they cost around £10, but leave room for slipstreaming some service packs and applications (something I'll go over in a future post).

Now we need to format the USB stick. Insert it into a USB port, and when it's ready to use, open up cmd.exe and type "diskpart" to launch the Windows program of that name. You might get a UAC prompt. Once the command prompt states that "diskpart" has been started, type "list disk", to get a list of all disks (hard drives, DVDs, USB sticks, etc.) that are currently connected to your computer. We need to get the number assigned to your USB stick, shown in the column labelled "Disk ###". Once you know what number your USB stick is, type the following commands:

select disk X
clean
create partition primary
select partition X
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Where "X" is the number assigned to your USB stick. Make sure you get this right, otherwise you'll be formatting one of your hard drives!

If the above was completed, your USB stick is now ready to receive the files to turn it into an installation disk. If you have an installation CD that you want to convert to the USB stick, put it in the computer, and when it is ready, type the following command into command prompt:

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

Where d:\ and e:\ are the drive letters of your DVD-RW drive and your USB stick, respectively (change if necessary).

If you have an ISO file that you want to "burn" to the USB stick, try an application like UNetbootin.

When everything is finished, go into the BIOS of the computer you want to install Windows on and change the boot order so that it checks if it can boot from USB stick, restart again and go! If you're using this to install a program from the USB stick, rather than an operating system, then you should be able to do this right away from the USB stick in the same way you'd do it from an installation DVD.

Useful?