How to install Windows 7 from a USB - part 1

So after reading our review of Windows 7, you’re ready to take the plunge and upgrade to Microsoft's new OS. You’ve read our upgrade guide, decided whether you want 32- or 64-bit Windows 7, and bought your retail box. But what if you want to install Windows 7 on a netbook or other computer without an optical drive?

Fortunately, you’re not out of luck, because Windows 7 (and Vista, for that matter) can be installed from a USB storage key. Not only does installing from a USB key remove the need for a DVD drive, the install time is also greatly reduced – we shaved off minutes from the total install time. Our step-by-step guide will have you rocking the new version of Windows in no time!

Note: This guide will only work within Windows Vista or 7.

Time = 1 hour

What you need:

• 4GB USB key
  $10, www.newegg.com
• WinRAR
  Free Evaluation Copy, www.rarlab.com
• Windows 7
  $99 (OEM)

1.    Format Your USB Key

Plug in your USB key and back up any existing data stored on it. You’ll need to format the key before you can make it a bootable device.

Open up a Command Prompt as an Administrator. You can do this by finding the cmd.exe in yoru Windows/System32 folder, right-clicking the executable, and selecting “Run as Administrator”. Alternatively, type CMD in the Start Menu search field and activate the Command Prompt using Ctrl + Shift + Enter.

You should be under c:\Windows\system32 (assuming your Windows partition is the C drive). Type “diskpart” in the command line to enter the Disk Partition command line tool, which lets you format and create partitions on active disks.

Type “list disk” to reveal a list of all your active disks, each of which is associated with a number. Make a note of which one is your USB key, based on the capacity. In our screenshot below, our USB drive is Disk 6 (8GB).

Next, type the following commands, one at a time:
Select Disk # (Where # is the number of your USB disk. We typed “Select Disk 6”)
Clean (removes any existing partitions from the USB disk, including any hidden sectors)
Create Partition Primary (Creates a new primary partition with default parameters)
Select Partition 1 (Focus on the newly created partition)
Active (Sets the in-focus partition to active, informing the disk firmware that this is a valid system partition)
Format FS=NTFS (Formats the partition with the NTFS file system. This may take several minutes to complete, depending on the size of your USB key.)
Assign (Gives the USB drive a Windows volume and next available drive letter, which you should write down. In our case, drive “L” was assigned.)
Exit (Quits the DiskPart tool)

How to format USB drive using Linux terminal ..

How to format USB with Linux terminal ..  

[ Formatting a USB in Ubuntu or linux is as easy as make filesystem (mkfs).
mkfs and tab will show you all the filesystem types you can use:

[anc@localhost~]$ mkfs
mkfs mkfs.ext3 mkfs.jfs mkfs.ntfs mkfs.vfat
mkfs.cramfs mkfs.ext4 mkfs.minix mkfs.reiserfs mkfs.xfs
mkfs.ext2 mkfs.ext4dev mkfs.msdos mkfs.udffs

To format a USB drive all you need to know is its name, this can be found by
typing df at a terminal:

[anc@localhost~]$ df -hT
Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
--snip
/dev/sdc1 ext3 3.6G 3.3G 134M 97% /media/disk


In the above example my USB is sdc1 and is a 4G USB stick. As you can see
I changed it from NTFS to ext3.

FAT32 and NTFS are weak filesystems, not only are they prone to losing data but also
require constant defragging. Most linux filesystems (except ext2) are journalled. Thye never require defragging and have better security- the disadvantage is that if you format a USB memory stick as ext3 it cant be read under windows.

To answer your earlier question,

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1
mkfs.ntfs /dev/sdc1

would make FAT32 and NTFS filesystems on a memory stick called sdc1

Hope that helps. ]


[ This is another posting showing "how to do computing" for everyday computer usages... For a general public ]