Installing Windows 7 from a USB drive

One day I'm sitting there browsing the web, checking facebook, etc. and Windows comes up and says, "Hey, this beta copy of Windows 7 will expire in about a week". Great... this is just how I wanted to spend my weekend.

Not that I'm unfamiliar with the backup/wipe/reload process, but in the Windows XP days I had a nice unattended install that made the process a lot faster and more painless. However, since Windows Vista and Windows 7 use a new "fancy schmancy" WAIK method my old techniques no longer work.

Now of course I could just format the hard drive and reinstall Windows the old fashioned way - manually enter the product key, user name, time zone, etc., but that's way too easy. Anyone who claims to know me as more than an acquaintance knows that it's hard for me to pass up an opportunity to spend hours engineering a solution that saves 5 minutes. So, here we go...

Since I despise CD/DVD/Blu-Ray burner technology (the failure rate is WAY to high, discs burned on one drive won't read in another, etc.) my first step was figuring out how to install Windows 7 from a USB flash drive rather than a DVD. So, for this project I'll be using this super tiny flash drive from Buffalo. For those who are interested the model number is RUF2-PS16G.  Be forewarned, it's a little hard to find state side.  At the time of this entry GeekStuff4U is one of the few places I've found that sells them.

The steps for installing from a flash drive are as follows:

1. Create a active, primary, NTFS partition on your flash drive.
2. Copy the contents of your Windows 7 CD to the newly created partition
3. Open an administrative console and run "X:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 X: /mbr" where "X:" is the drive letter of your flash drive.
4. Make sure your system BIOS is configured to boot from USB drives.
5. Boot from the USB drive and enjoy.

In the next post I'll go over how to use WAIK to make the installation run without prompting you for a bunch of information.