Installing Windows 7 from USB – easier and faster way

I will be guiding you through the process of installing Windows 7 (works with Windows Vista also) using your USB pen drive. This is useful if you don’t have a cd-rom drive. (It is also a plus for those who have CD drive. Installing from usb is lot faster than through the slug like speed of CD drives.)

Requirements:

  • USB thumbdrive: NTFS usb pendrive with 2.34gb of free space. You don’t need to format your usb pendrive is already in NTFS.
  • Windows 7 Setup Files: You will need the setup files, either the original format ISO or just plain files/folders (bootsectors of the ISO are not required). If you got the ISO one, make sure you install some virtual cd emulators to access the contents inside the ISO file (most of the zip utilities also supports extracting ISO files, or go to your friends computer having a CDROM to copy the data to your USB pendrive).
  • Other Files (provided at the bottom of the post): Rather then using the diskpart utility we will be using grub as our bootloader to load the Windows 7 setup.

Steps:

  • Copy the windows setup file to the root of your USB pen drive. Your USB pendrive should contain the above structure. (Note: You don’t need to format your USB pendrive, but make sure your filesystem is NTFS, if not you may need to format it to NTFS)
  • Open command prompt: (Requires administrative privileges if using Windows Vista or Windows 7).
  • Find the disk number: The download below contains a file called mbrwiz.exe. Please execute the following command to find the drive number for your pendrive.
mbrwiz /list
  • Install GRUB boot loader: After knowing your pendrive disk number, you can now install the boot loader to your usb by running the following command. (Replace hd2 with appropriate disk numbers. Be very carefull when executing the following command)
grubinst (hd2)
  • Copy other files required by the GRUB boot loader: Copy the other two files grldr and menu.lst file to the root of the usb drive. These are necessary for the grldr.

Now you are ready. You can now install Windows 7 or Windows Vista using your pen drive. When you boot, you will come up with some options, choose find and load BOOTMGR of Windows VISTA to run Windows Setup and when it is time for the rebooting that is after the setup copies your files, remove the usb drive from the computer.

grub_mbrwiz.zip (206.70 kb)