Showing posts with label Installation tips. Show all posts

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Install Windows 8 from USB Pen Drive

With the release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview, my curiosity could not let me wait and I rushed to install it right then. But not having an optical drive on my netbook could hinder my installation and hence I had to come up with this alternative of installing it via a pen drive. And to my surprise, when I tried to make a Windows 8 bootable pen drive using the Microsoft’s very own Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.

System Requirements for Windows 8 are:

1 Gigahertz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor
1 Gigabyte of RAM for 32-bit, 2 Gigabytes of RAM for 64-bit minimum
16 Gigabyte hard drive for 32-bit systems, 20 Gigabyte for 64-bit systems
Direct X 9 graphics card

The prerequisits for the installation are as follows:

Firstly, you need to download the Microsoft Windows 8 Developer Preview Image from here.
Next, you need to have with your self the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool, which can be downloaded from here.
You need an USB pen drive with at least four Gigabytes of free space.

With both the softwares downloaded we are now ready to make our own bootable pen drive with Windows 8. Though it does require few tweaks other than making the pen drive bootable, you can follow the steps as given below:


Formating the Pen Drive

Firstly, we need to format the pen drive to the FAT32 file system. This can be done by connecting the pen drive to the computer, right-clicking its drive icon and selecting Format from the drop down menu. The Format window pops up where you need to make sure that Fat32 is the selected file system. Other details need not be changed.
Once this is done, open the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.
Then just select the Windows 8 ISO when asked to pick an ISO image from the computer.
Next, select to copy the contents to an USB drive. The program will copy all files to the drive and make that drive bootable at the same time.
Once this is done, restart your PC, get into the BIOS by pressing F8/F12 as per your manufacturer and goto the Boot Configuration section and enable the USB Booting as well as make USB Booting primary in the booting preference.
Save the settings and exit the BIOS.
On restart, the computer should now automatically boot through the pen drive and begin the installation.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Use USB Flash Drive As Windows 7 Installation Platform

This technique is very cool for two reasons: First, a flash drive is much more responsive than an optical drive, since it doesn’t rely on physically moving components, so the installation procedure will be faster. Second, it provides an easy way to install Microsoft Windows 7 on a system that doesn’t have a DVD drive, such as a netbook.

Getting started

Of course, in order to employ this technique you’ll need a USB flash drive that is big enough to hold the contents of the Windows 7 DVD. The Windows 7 RC DVD is about 2.5GB, and you can expect that the RTM DVD will be at least that if not more. For my test system I am using a 4GB USB flash drive.

Keep in mind that the procedure we will use will completely reformat the USB flash drive. So you want to make sure that you back up any data that you have on the drive before you begin.

The systems on which you want to install Windows 7 via the USB flash drive have to be able to be configured to boot from a USB drive. Most new systems have the capability to boot from a USB flash drive, and the operation can usually be configured in the BIOS or by simply pressing a certain key during bootup. You’ll need to check your specific hardware in order to be sure.

Using the DiskPart utility

As you may know, the DiskPart utility is a command-line version of the Disk Management snap-in and is designed to allow you to manage disks, partitions, or volumes from within scripts or directly from a command prompt. We can use the DiskPart command in Windows Vista or in Windows 7 to configure a USB flash drive to be a bootable device. (Keep in mind that Windows XP’s DiskPart command is unable to create a bootable USB flash drive.)

To begin, connect your USB flash drive to a computer on which you will be preparing the drive. For my example, I’ll be using a Windows Vista system.

Now, locate the command Prompt shortcut on the Start menu, right-click on it, and select the Run as Administrator command. Then, respond appropriately to the UAC. You can now launch the DiskPart utility by typing DiskPart on the command line. You’ll then see the DISKPART prompt, as shown in Figure A.

Figure A

DiskPart has its own command-line environment complete with a special prompt.

Now that you’re in the DiskPart environment, you’ll need to locate the USB flash drive using the List Disk command. As you can see in Figure B, the List Disk command has identified my USB flash drive as Disk 5. I can verify that my USB flash drive is indeed Disk 5 by checking the Size column, which lists the size as 3906MB, which is roughly 4GB.

Figure B

Using the List Disk command displays all the disks in the system.

(If you have difficulty identifying your USB flash drive using the List Disk command, you can try the List Volume command, which will provide the drive letter as well as the label, both of which can help you to identify the drive.)

Once you identify the drive number of your USB flash drive, you will need to set the focus of the DiskPart environment on that disk. (This is an extremely important step–Make sure that you select the correct drive or you could accidentally destroy valuable data!). On my example, the USB flash drive is Disk 5, so I will use the command Select Disk 5, as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

To shift the focus over to the USB flash drive you’ll use the Select Disk command.

Now that your USB flash drive has the focus, you need to remove all the partition or volume formatting information from the disk. To do that, you’ll use the Clean command. The Clean operation should occur rather quickly. When it is done you will see a success message like the one shown in Figure D.

Figure D

In order to start with a clean slate you’ll use the Clean command to remove all partition and volume information from the USB flash drive.

You’ll now use the Create Partition Primary command to create a primary partition on the disk. After you create the partition, you will see a success message and the focus will automatically shift to the new partition. You’ll use the Active command to mark the partition as active, as shown in Figure E. Marking the partition as active will essentially allow the BIOS to recognize that the partition is a valid bootable system partition.

Figure E

Using the Create Partition Primary and the Active commands, you’ll create a bootable partition on the USB flash drive.

With the partition created and active, you’re now ready to quickly format the drive and set up the FAT32 file system using the Format fs=FAT32 quick command. (While you could format the drive as NTFS, the typical way to format a USB flash drive is to use FAT32.) Once the drive is formatted, you’ll use the Assign command, as shown in Figure F, to allow the drive to be assigned a drive letter.

Figure F

To complete the preparation, you’ll format the drive and assign it a drive letter.

The USB flash drive is now ready. At this point, you can use the Exit command to exit the DiskPart environment and then close the Command Prompt window.

Copying the Windows 7 files

Copying the Windows 7 files is easy. Just open Windows Explorer, access the Windows 7 DVD, select all the files and folders, and then drag and drop them on the USB flash drive icon, as shown in Figure G. Keep in mind that the copy operation will take a little while to complete.

Figure G

Once the USB flash drive is ready to go, you can copy all the files and folders from the Windows 7 DVD to the newly prepared bootable drive.

Installing Windows 7 from the USB flash drive

With the contents of the Windows 7 DVD on a bootable USB flash drive, installing the operating system is a snap. Just boot the system from the USB drive and the installation procedure will begin as it normally would, as shown in Figure H. However, the installation procedure will actually run quicker off of a USB flash drive since it doesn’t contain any physically moving components.