Got a laptop or netbook without a DVD drive that you want to format and install a new operating system on? Well, don't rush out to the store to spend $50 on an external USB drive. Just whip out that ol' thumb drive and use that instead! Here are some step by step directions for installing an OS with a thumb drive.

Pre-Requisites

• A thumb drive large enough to hold the OS you want to install. The faster the bigger. Many people recommend the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0. It's the fastest USB 2.0 Flash Drive that we've found - it has a read speed of 25MBytes/sec. & a write speed-14MBytes/sec
• A bios that supports booting from a USB device
• A secondary machine that you can use to xcopy the contents of a DVD to the thumb drive. Alternatively you could mount an ISO image using DVD virtualization software to stage the install files.

Instructions Run CMD.EXE and type the following:

diskpart

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Copy the content of your install DVD to the root of the Flash Drive. I would recommend using the xcopy command. Here is an example:

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

Believe it or not, you are done. Stick in the USB drive and reboot your machine! If you did everything correctly you should be able to start the install.