INSTALL WINDOWS SEVEN FROM A USB DISK WITHOUT ANY SOFTWARE

How to create a bootable usb device and install WINDOWS 7 from it

THE PROBLEM:

- How can I install Windows 7 from a USB Device.

THE PRINCIPLE:

Windows 7 can be easily installed from a USB Device. All you need is a USB Disk of atleast 4GB and some time (30 seconds) to make it bootable. You will not need any other software and you can do it as often as you want without damaging your USB Disk. We will use the DISKPART command-line utility.

Diskpart is one of Windows essential command-line utilities, it is the successor to Fdisk that  appeared first in Windows XP. This tool lets you perform a wide range of hard disk related tasks such as 

•  creating partitions

•  formatting partitions

• initialising partitions

• making partitions bootable

•  resize drives or partitions

• setting up RAID partitions... and much more

For this tutorial, we will concentrate on the making partitions bootable with the "active" sub command.

Note For the Geeks andd curious readers: you can download a complete list of ALL the DISKPART sub commands HERE.

THE SOLUTION:

First we have to make the USB device bootable, to do this follow these steps:

1) Plug in the USB Device with which you want to install WINDOWS 7 on your computer.

2) Open the command line (Start > Run > cmd OR WINDOWS + R), once open, type diskpart and press Enter.

3) Once you’re in the tool, you will notice that Diskpart has its own command prompt. Diskpart is a sort of command line interface (CLI) inside a CLI  

4) Type "list disk" without the quotes. This command displays a list of all physical disks connected to the computer. You notice there are 2 disks listed. Here the first one is my hard disk (74 Gb) and the second is the USB key i want to make bootable (7660 Mb).

NOTE: Only Physical disks are listed. This means that even if my hard is partitioned (it is!)
only the physical disk containing the partition will be listed.

5) Type "select disk <number of the Disk of the USB device >" without the quotes. This command as its name suggests selects the specified disk. For my USB Device I type "select disk 1".

6) Type "clean disk" without the quotes. This command cleans all the configuration information off the disk, or all other information.

7) Type "create partition primary" without the quotes. Self explanatory command.

8) Type "select partition <number of the Disk of the USB device >". This selects the newly created partition.

9) Type "active" without the quotes. This is the command that actually makes the device bootable.

10) Finally you have to format the USB Device and assign it a letter. To do this, use the commands "format" (with fs option fat32 or ntfs for faster installation eg "format fs=ntfs") and "assign". And you are done!

The Screenshot below summarises all the above steps, assuming the USB Device in which to install WINDOWS 7 is "disk 1"

Now just copy ALL the files from the WINDOWS 7 installation DVD to your USB Device. After completion of copying you can boot computer from the USB Device (Change the boot option in your BIOS setup. Make the USB Device as the first boot option).

Thats it.

 I know it will be useful! Stay tuned...

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