Installing Windows 7 Using a USB Flash Drive – Part 1 – Prepping the Flash Drive

I decided to document the process that I need to go through to install Windows 7 onto a new Netbook that I am prepping for my father. I decided to try to do this without using an external USB DVD drive.I needed a 4GB drive which I didn’t have one free so I decided to use one of my SD Flash cards I use with my camera. I have previously reviewed the Mizco SD Reader that I use to read my SD Flash Memory Cards. It turns any SD Flash Memory Card into a USB Flash Drive.

So the first thing that you need to do is to set the memory card as a bootable USB Drive. I am doing this from my Windows 7 Desktop and the procedure is as follows:

Step #1: Format the Drive

The steps here are to use the command line to format the disk properly using the diskpart utility. [Be warned: this will erase everything on your drive. Be careful.]

1. Plug in your USB Flash Drive
2. Open a command prompt as administrator (Right click on Start > All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt and select “Run as administrator”
3. Find the drive number of your USB Drive by typing the following into the Command Prompt window:
   diskpart
   list disk
   The number of your USB drive will listed. You’ll need this for the next step.  I’ll assume that the USB flash drive is disk 2.
4. Format the drive by typing the next instructions into the same window. Replace the number “2” with the number of your disk below.
   select disk 2
   clean
   create partition primary
   select partition
   active
   format fs=NTFS
   assign
   exit
   When that is done you’ll have a formatted USB flash drive ready to be made bootable.

Step 2: Make the Drive Bootable 
Next we’ll use the bootsect utility that comes on the Vista or Windows 7 disk to make the flash drive bootable. I am using an ISO file formatted file for my Win7 install disk and since I have the new version of WINZIP that can access an ISO file directly I am accessing the files in that manner. However, you will probably have a Win7 install CD and I will document accessing in that manner as well. I dropped the contents of my ISO file into a folder on my desktop and that’s how I gained access to the files the same way that you would to your CD.

(Turns out that WinZip was missing files when I performed the above procedure. I eventually burned a DVD and copied the files across as stated below. That worked like a charm. I have had great success running WinZip on ISO files and installing directly from there. That seems to work just fine.)

In the same command window that you were using in Step 1:

1. Insert your Windows Vista / 7 DVD into your drive.
2. Change directory to the DVD’s boot directory where bootsect lives:
   d:
   cd d:\boot
3. Use bootsect to set the USB as a bootable NTFS drive prepared for a Vista/7 image. I’m assuming that your USB flash drive has been labeled disk G:\ by the computer:
   bootsect /nt60 G:
4. You can now close the command prompt window, we’re done here.

Step 3: Copy the installation DVD to the USB drive
The easiest way is to use Windows explorer to copy all of the files on your DVD on to the formatted flash drive.  After you’ve copied all of the files the disk you are ready to go.

Step 4: Set your BIOS to boot from USB
This is where you’re on your own since every computer is different. Most BIOS’s allow you to hit a key at boot and select a boot option. On most Acer notebooks/Netbooks you will be pressing F2 to jump into the Bios setup when booting your system. Go to the Bios page that controls the boot device order and make your USB device the topmost choice in the boot sequence.

Note: As it turned out, I wasn’t able to complete the install of Windows 7 on this machine this past weekend because the controller couldn’t take being loaded from a USB Flash Drive. Whoops. So we stuck a USB DVD drive on the Netbook and installation went just fine. So much for trying to be inventive to work around not having a portable USB DVD drive.