How to install Windows from your USB Stick

This tutorial is ment to help people like myself who are with out any CD or DVD-Burner to install one of the modern operation systems. The tutorial is ment for Windows Vista and it's functions.

Requirements
- A Mainboard which support booting by an usb-stick
- A USB-Stick with enough space [1 GB or more]
- A Windows-CD or just a Windows Image with the files from a CD.
- [Vista as OS]

" Oh, I don't have a Windows-CD, where can I get the image?"
I aint gona tell you some illegal stuff here.

" Oh, I dont have Vista."
Download PetoUSB, it will format the stick for you.


Steps for Windows Vista

Start Formating the USB-Stick and make it bootable. You should format it in FAT-32.

Press the Windows-Button + R on your keyboard. Type cmd in the window and the dos console will launch.

Execute the following commands
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10.diskpart
list disk
select disk x (while x is the number of your USB stick in the list)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 (can take a while)
assign
exit
Unpack the Windows-Files from your Windows-CD by copying the all the files to your local hardware drive. (Example: C:\WindowsCD)

When having an image, do the following:
- Mount the image using Daemon Tools (or another programm of your choice)
- Copy the files to a directory of your choice. (Example: C:\WindowsCD)


Now download a small Program called WinSetupFromUsb, you can get it here.

After you have installed it, put the path to the Windows-CD in it:
image: sshot1es.th


Don't chane anything else and just press "Go". This might take a while.

After closing this annoying Window which appears after it has finished,
you can take the stick as a Boot-Medium.

After that, there will be a two-part installation of windows,
you dont have to chane anything, the PC will reboot after the first part and select the second one itself.

I hope it is kinda useful. Except the operation system all tools are available for free.
Comments
13
How do you get your bios to recognise the USB stick as a bootable device?

Will it just come up automatically?
Depending on your bios you can press a button at boot screen to popup multiboot functions out of which you can select where to boot from (CD, HDD, USB, etc)
Parent
If it supports booting rom USB-Stick, it will recognize it.[It will do it too when the USB-Stick isn't correctly formated]
You just need a newer Mainboard which supports that...
You can change your Boot sequence in BIOS by pressing f2 or del or whatever while booting.
go to advanced bios settings and change boot sequence.

@ my laptop i have to press f11 and a small bios windows opens where i can change the order.

Hope i could help u
Parent
ah kool yeh guess it makes sense - i'll have a go with damn-small-linux on my computer

i have a fairly new asus motherboard so it should support it.

thanks
Parent
np m8 :D
I dont have any experience with linux.
I wanna install gentoo, but i have read that it's really really hard to handle for an unexperienced user like me ;D
I don't know if I can install it from USB stick...Do u know anything about that?
Parent
urrgh gentoo dont lol

you have to compile all programs from source and stuff like that - not worth the bother

Ubuntu is the standard newbie linux and i recommend it having used it myself
People also like Fedora

all depends what you want from an OS/Linux, I had to use it for a course and development so Ubuntu was fine but im back on windows7 now because of games & vent
Parent
mhm okay thank you :]
Btw - Is linux faster than windows?
I heard gentoo would be faster than winXP and things like that :]
Parent
umm depends

gentoo is a barebones OS u add only what u want so it can be very fast depending how you set it up

personally ive not really noticed a difference in speed but my computer is quite modern so its hard to tell except on games which really only work on windows

use Ubuntu for a bit and see how it goes and when u feel comfortable with the linux environment switch to gentoo. It takes a little getting used to but its fine :)

either that or dual boot like i do with Windows7 and *some linux distro* then u have the best of both worlds :)
Parent
Copycat ?
Dunno , met lots of such tuts on the Internet.
Parent
I found one in german, used it myself and changed/added some things which were good/not good.
Parent
Works with XP? :o anyone tried?
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