Install Windows 7 from USB drive using DISKPART

Windows 7 can be installed from a USB drive when the other installation methods are unavailable. We can choose between a memory card, hard drive which is USB compatible etc., and also several 3rd party tools are available for creating a USB bootable Windows 7 installation media, but I am using the “diskpart” command-line tool. Diskpart is a very good tool as it comes along with your install of Windows Vista, 7 and Server 2008.

Benefits of this method:

Ø         Faster than a DVD installation

Ø         Also useful when a DVD drive isn’t available

Ø         Update the installation files

Requirements:

Ø         Need a USB flash drive (HDD, pen drive etc) with atleast 4GB of free space.

Ø         Windows 7 source DVD

Ø         Windows Vista / Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 installed computer for the USB preparation

Procedure:

Ø         Preparing the USB media

Ø         Copying the files to USB media

Ø         Installation

Step 1:

Plug in your USB device onto a USB port.

Step 2:

Launch the elevated command prompt.

Start-> on the Search button type “cmd” -> right click -> Run as administrator

Step 3:

Now launch “diskpart” from command line.

Step 4:

List the available disks in the command line using “list disk“.

On listing a device disk 1 is seen. Its my 8Gb USB drive which is been converted to the bootable device.

Step 5:

Now run the “select disk” command to select the desired USB disk drive. I did the “select disk 2” since disk 2 is my USB disk drive.

Now again run the “list disk” command and see a flag is been set on the USB disk stating that the diskpart tool has selected the disk 2 to do some operations.

Step 6:

Now flush all the data on the selected disk by the “clean” command.

Note: The clean command will wipe all the partitions in the selected disk, so remember to save all of your valuable data before running the “clean” command.

Step 7:

Create a primary partition on disk using “create primary partition” command.

Step 8:

Now create a file system (prefer using fat32) on the the primary partition on disk 2. The word quick defines to perform a quick format.

format fs=fat32 quick

Step 9:

Make the new partition active using “active” once the formatting is complete.

Here the active shows no partition is selected message. So again select the disk “select disk 2“. Once again do a listing “list disk“.

Now select partition 1 on the selected disk using “select partition 1“.

Now try to make it active using “active“.

Step 10:

Now assign  a drive letter to it using “assign“. Once you have done with the assign command the new partition will be mounted and appear in your My Computer. Then exit the diskpart utility.

Step 11:

Now insert the windows 7 DVD or mount the ISO image. My windows 7 DVD drive is assigned with the drive letter I. Check carefully for what is in your case.

Now copy all files from the DVD drive into the USB device using the “xcopy” tool.

Note: Using an ISO image is better than using a DVD as it takes only little time to copy onto the USB disk. So prefer using an ISO image and mount it into your virtual DVD drive. Here I used PowerISO for mounting the image since it is a simple software.

Now run the xcopy command to copy all files from source dvd (my case its I drive) into the USB drive (J drive in my case). Please both of these in you case.

xcopy I:\*.* /s/e/f J:\

The copy process will take a couple of minutes (max up to 15 mints). Once all the files are being copied that’s all you are almost done.

Now eject the USB drive and insert it into a computer and try to boot from it.

Note: Change the BIOS settings if needed in order to enable booting from the USB device.

Once you opted to boot from the USB will see the installation process is being started quiet as pretty as it is booted from a DVD.