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.

Windows 7 Wish-List

My copy of PC Pro arrived last week, and I fell on it like a vulture onto the carcass of a lamb! Inside there's an article about the forthcoming new operating system from those boys in Redmond, Windows 7. I was rather disappointed to find that there's no interesting code-name for the beast. Within the article, however, there was a section where a few people had put in their wants for this new OS. Let me detail what I'd like, with a few reasons.

1. I want to be able to set the program defaults for every user who logs into the machine - like the ability to configure IE without the end user having to think it through. Working in a school one becomes aware of how the younger children are completely lost when presented with the "Now let's set up how you search the internets" page on first starting IE. All they want to do is to find their favourite games sites, and having to talk every single year 3, 4 and 5 student through the decision on which internet search engine they want to use is seriously eating into my support time.
This also goes goes for WMP - I want all the machines to behave the same.

2. Sound. Why, for the love of Mike, is Windows configured to play a little tune on login? Can you imagine a room of 20 computers, many of which don't have functioning headphones (because children are tiny little vandals) all logging in at the same time? 10 times a day? After the first time it becomes REALLY annoying - the kids aren't allowed to use the control panel, and thus cannot configure this. And if they could - remember these are children. They're going to choose something which grates even more. So on the wish list for Windows 7 - make the default sounds settings as No Sounds.

3. For pity's sake stop hiding things. I've spent ages learning how to be damn good with XP, and I know where to find most things (although I do have some problems with registry entries). But in Vista I'm completely lost. I want to check my network connections - I head to Control Panel, Network Connections. Where do I head in Vista? Sadly this is not a rhetorical question, because I've not yet worked that one out :(

4. Stop swamping me with messages. Apparently a recent study of popups found that most people will do anything except actually read the message in front of them in order to get rid of those annoying messages that Windows (and loads of other programs) pop up onto your screen to tell you something. It's not even that people are idiots - it's just that there are TOO DAMN MANY of these dumb messages. I don't need to know that I have unused icons on my desktop. I suspect more people would read them if there weren't so many which are completely information free. Or if the information had anything to do with the real world. You'd almost think that all programmers were, in fact, elitist sons of bitches.

5. I'd like to be able to set a default printer for a machine, which will override any network settings. So if a PC has a printer attached, I can say that this is the default printer for every user who logs on. While I want to be able to restrict my users from doing things I don't want them to do, I'd like to be able to make their lives easier, by providing the most useful set of defaults. There are some settings which can't be set by group policies.

Actually, this is much more of a DO NOT WANT list than a wish list of new functionality. I do want more control over new accounts than I have at the moment, and I really do want to be able to set more defaults, more easily.

So, Microsoft, are you really listening to your customers?