Delayed Post: How I Installed Windows 7 From USB HDD
Andrew Bolster
Senior R&D Manager (Data Science) at Black Duck Software and Treasurer @ Bsides Belfast and NI OpenGovernment Network
As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives.
This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on.
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Get a USB drive > 4GB
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Use The Disk Managment pane in Computer Managment (Control Panel > Administrative tools)
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Find your drive and right-click > Format the partition as NTFS
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Once its formatted, right click it again and ‘Mark Partition as Active’
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Use a image mounter such as WinCDEmu to mount the Windows 7 image
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Drop into a cmd prompt and navigate to the drive where the Window7 image is mounted, cd to ‘boot’ and execute ‘bootsect /nt60 X:’ where X: is the drive letter the target partition is mounted on.
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Copy the contents of the mounted Windows 7 image to ‘X:’
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Reboot and if you dont know how to boot from a USB drive, you probably arn’t reading this, but if not…
I know there are alternative methods for doing this in Linux, but since i didnt use them in this instance, i cant comment on them.
FYI: Windows 7 is now my full time OS, and frankly im suprised; Theres a few things I miss, like a nice easy command line networking, SSH built in, a decent X11 server, but for a all round notes/documentation/lil-bit-o-code machine, the Tableting pros few out-weigh the cons. E.G The wonderous marvelous stupendous Math Input Panel that outputs in MathML!