One of the features we enjoy most of those that have been ushered in with the most recent versions of Windows is the ability to install the OS directly from a USB stick. It’s also something we tend to be asked about a fair bit, so we thought we’d do a quick “How To” post on it, for those who are having a little trouble with the whole affair.

Sadly, few netbooks come with Windows 7 and far fewer come with optical drives to install it...

For those who haven’t considered it yet, the fact is that Windows 7 not only offers a lot more in terms of features, but also manages to be better suited to running on some devices than its predecessors. This much is particularly true of netbooks, though of course there are very few netbooks that boast DVD drives (if any remain by now). While you can opt to pick up an external DVD drive, slot your Windows 7 DVD into it and work from there, it’s worth noting that it’s not too difficult to install Windows 7 from a USB stick.

Given that most will already have a USB stick big enough to accommodate the installation lying around, there likely won’t be any real cost beyond that of the operating system itself. Moreover, because of the fact that you’re loading from flash memory, you’ll find that your installation itself goes an awful lot more quickly, but we’ll talk about that more a little later on.

Formatting the Drive:

Step one, if you do decide to go down the road of installing Windows 7 via a USB stick, will be to format the drive itself. We shouldn’t have to tell you at this stage that you’ll want to take everything sitting on the stick itself off and put it somewhere safe in the meantime, but if we don’t there tends to be an angry email later in the day.

A sizeable USB stick isn't a prohibitively expensive thing either

Once you’ve got your data safely secured somewhere else, simply plug in the device and open the command prompt. If you’re currently running Vista then you can get to it by throwing CMD into the search bar in the Start menu, otherwise just type CMD into the “Run” bar. From there, the instructions are relatively simple. You’ll need to be running as administrator for this to work properly, but that shouldn’t be too much trouble.

You’ll want to type, “list disk” for a list of all the drives attached to your machine. Look for the drive-letter of your USB stick and you’ll see that it’s also been assigned a number. From there, you’ll type, “select disk X,” replacing ‘X’ with the number of your USB drive. You should then receive a message to tell you that,

“Disk X is now the selected disk.”

From there, all you need to do is type, “clean” and, when prompted, “create partition primary,” followed by “select partition 1” then “active” and finish the whole thing up by typing “format fs=fat32 quick.”

It’s all relatively straightforward, and gets you on to step two, which will see an awful lot less messing around with the command prompt and an awful lot more easy-to-use interfaces.

Setting up the Disk:

Once you’re done with your formatting adventure, you can move on to the much simpler process of actually adding Windows 7 to it so that it’ll do all the interesting bits and pieces you need it to, like actually allowing you to install Windows 7 on a machine.

The whole mounting process should be fairly self explanatory

Fortunately, this whole process is relatively simple, especially if you already have something like Nero or PowerISO installed that will allow you to mount a disk image (usually an ISO). If you don’t, things are still relatively easy as long as you don’t mind downloading a copy of MagicISO (don’t worry, it’s all nice and free). Once you’ve downloaded it MagicISO should walk you through installation in short order, bringing us to the last part of step two.

From there all you’ll need to do is right click on your Windows 7 ISO and head towards the “mount” options for MagicISO, which should let you simply mount the Windows 7 disc image to a virtual drive. You may be prompted to install MagicDisc at that stage, if you are then let it do its thing and then mount the disc. Once you’ve done so, you can simply open the drive in explorer and copy all of the various files across to your USB stick, easy as it sounds.

Installation:

From there, things should be pretty much business as usual for those who are familiar with installing Windows. If you’ve not installed Windows before, you’ll be happy to hear that the whole process is a relatively simple one, and it should sort you out quite neatly.

Installing Windows 7 is actually a fairly easy business

Of course, for many machines you’ll have to set things up so that you can actually boot from a USB device, which will mean a quick jaunt into the BIOS. This one will vary from machine to machine, so we can’t offer specific advice, sadly. Once you’ve managed to find your way into your BIOS, all you need to do is set it so that you’re booting from the USB stick and you shouldn’t have any more trouble.

One of the things you’ll notice is that the installer’s estimations of its own length will be fairly drastically off. This isn’t anything wrong at all, but because Windows is generally going to be installed from a disc, the estimated times seem to be calculated accordingly. So, don’t panic if you’re looking at an estimated time for installation that’s out by forty minutes, the whole install should be quick and painless affair.

We would include more detail on installing Windows itself, but given the fact that it holds your hand throughout, there’s not too much we’d be able to add on that front.

Closing:

This is a guide that a few people had asked us to do up a while back and we thought we should do. Of course, this is the slightly more roundabout way of going about the whole business of installing Windows 7 from a USB stick, since Microsoft does offer the Windows 7 Download tool, which essentially automates the whole process. Still, since there have been some issues for those trying out the download tool, we thought it’d be worthwhile to post this as a ‘how to’ piece, just in case.

If you’d like to take a look at the exceedingly simple way to do this in a step-by-step guide using Microsoft’s own tool for it, then you can check one out over at IntoWindows.

If you’d like to download the Windows 7 Download tool you can grab it here. It makes the whole process that bit easier, but if you ever find yourself doing it by hand, you know where to find us.