Can One Install Windows 7 from a USB stick?

I wanted to make a rambling post about how I'd done this, but I'm actually trying to provide some instruction here, so I'll just go into what I did.

I googled it. The first thing I did when I realised how difficult it was going to be to get my netbook booting from an external DVD drive was to shove "install windows 7 from usb" into google search, and I got back a handful of useful sites. In fact, the first 4 links are incredible. But complicated. Needlessly so, I worked out.

There's a neat little tool to download, the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool, which would be great, except that it refused to accept my Win7 ISO as a proper ISO. Of course I'm not longer able to download a copy of the Beta file, either, so I gave up on that route.

Many of the links were talking about using diskpart, but this doesn't work on XP, which doesn't list as real hard drives the USB sticks you have in the machine.

So, with many thanks to the results I was able to find, here's what I actually did.

You will need:

1. USB stick - at least 4Gb has been recommended, so I went with that

2. Windows 7 disk / ISO / whatever. You'll need to extract the ISO, if that's what you have.

3. A pc running whatever version of windows with which you feel comfortable, which also has a DVD drive.

You need to:

1. Format the USB stick. Open up my computer, right-click on the USB stick (and make a note of the drive letter), and choose format. It didn't matter that I chose to quick format. I just wanted to make sure it was clear before I started.

2. You need to convert this USB stick to NTFS format. Start, Run, CMD. When you have a command prompt, you can use the command

convert e: /FS:NTFS

I've assumed that your USB stick is the E: drive. This was successful for me, so I continued. Don't exit the command prompt just yet.

3. Put the Windows 7 DVD into the drive, but don't let it run. Since you're still at the command prompt, navigate to the DVD. I'm assuming your DVD is in the D: drive. At the command prompt, type

d:

then type

cd boot

bootsect /nt60 e:

replacing e: with the drive letter of your USB stick.

At this point you can exit the command prompt and finish off in XP. Open up an explorer window, and copy the contents of the DVD to the USB stick.

Voila! Ready to boot USB stick with Windows 7 on it.

I wonder if this works with XP.