Installing Windows 7 beta from a USB stick

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MielieSpoor

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Wow is all I can say...

I was surprised, however: Even on a relatively underpowered netbook, installing off USB flash media was significantly faster – and quieter! – than installing from DVD.
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Article
 
Wow I would never have thought... Too bad I don't have a big enough Flash Drive
 
Further to that in case some people don't have an international cap left here is the process to boot from USB mem stick.

So Windows 7 beta is out the door and you are ready to begin your beta experience. Over the next few months there will be additional builds for Windows 7 (x86 and x64) as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 and that leads to a lot of installs and a lot of DVD burning and useless DVDs as soon as a new build is out. So why not install from USB or whatever other removable media your computer can boot from? Insert your removable media into a Windows XP or Vista PC and run the following commands from an elevated command prompt.

1. diskpart
2. list disk (find the disk number for the removable media)
3. select disk #
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=fat32
9. assign letter=y (or any free drive letter)
10. exit

Once that is complete mount the ISO and run the following command.

xcopy x:\*.* /s/e/f y:\

Where “x” is the drive letter of the mounted ISO. Once complete boot off the device and install the OS. When a new Windows 7 or 2008 R2 build is released, simply delete the contents, rerun the xcopy command and you are ready to go again. As a note this also works for Windows Vista and Server 2008 but you already figured that out :)

You can grab the Windows 7 and Server 2008 beta (as of January 9th, 2009) at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ and there are plenty more Windows 7 resources coming to the TechNet Springboard site as well!
 
Thanks for posting that here Juggy.

Found a flash drive I can use:), formatting in progress
 
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I think a lot of guys would say: "This is a bit to late, already installed from the DVD. Thanx anyway" :D
 
This is a bit too late, already installed from the DVD. Thanx anyway :)

Going to use the one on the flash drive to install it on my sister's laptop :)
 
Yay.. it only took Microsoft about 4 years to catch up on this old trick.
 
When i want to install Win7 x64 i get a error Hal.dll missing. I have WinXP Pro installed as well that is working.
Any help
 
Dictionary.com said:
miss⋅ing
–adjective
1. lacking, absent, or not found: a missing person.
—Idiom
2. go missing, Chiefly British. to disappear; become lost: My keys have gone missing.
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See what I mean?
 
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Well if it says hal.dll is missing, it is either corrupted or missing completely on your install media. You will need to create another disk or copy it to a flash drive again to install it. If your processor is overheating, it might give you file missing errors, it happened to me on my old PC.
 
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