It is common these days for a computer to ship without a DVD drive, especially when you are dealing with netbooks and laptops. Most of the time this isn’t a problem. You can usually get around these shortcomings by sharing a DVD drive as a network share or by using a virtual DVD drive such as Virtual Clone Drive. The real problem occurs when you need to install a new operating system such as Windows 7. This is when you have to resort to other measures such as booting from a USB thumb drive.
- Download the image file for Windows 7 and extract it to a folder using either WinRar or 7-zip. Currently the Windows 7 RTM release is available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers.
- Verify that your thumb drive is big enough to hold the Windows 7 image.
- Format your thumb drive using NTFS. This can be done by right clicking on the drive in my computer and choosing the Format… option. Once the dialog appears choose the NTFS file system and make sure the Quick Format option is checked.
- Navigate to the boot folder in the Windows 7 directory that you extracted in step 1 and look for the file named bootsect.exe. Copy this file to the c: drive on your computer.
- Open a command prompt. If you are using Windows Vista then make sure you run the command prompt as an administrator. Once the command prompt is ready, switch to the c: drive and enter in the command bootsect /nt60 <thumb drive drive letter>. For example, if your thumb drive is letter e: then the command would be bootsect /nt60 e:. This will make your thumb drive bootable.
- Copy the Windows 7 files to the thumb drive.
- Reboot your computer and hopefully you should see the Windows 7 installation menu. If you do not see the menu they you may need to modify your BIOS settings so the thumb drive can be seen as a bootable device.
That's it! Only 7 steps to install Windows 7 from a thumb drive. Wow, weird coincidence!
