Linux – Setting up LiveCD + USB drive boot combination for a headless server

Update: Microsoft has created the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool to make this very easy.

I used this guide as a set of directions - http://kurtsh.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DA410C7F7E038D!1665.entry

1. Get a USB Thumbdrive between 4-32GB.

If the drive is larger than 32GB, Windows cannot format it as FAT32, so an alternate utility must be used. Windows can still read FAT32 partitions larger than 32GB, though some devices cannot.

2. Run cmd.exe as administrator and enter the following commands followed by Enter

1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk # (where # is your USB drive as determined from step 2)
4. clean (This step will delete all data on your flash drive!)
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32 quick
8. assign
9. list volume
10. exit
11. bootsect.exe /nt60 F: /mbr (where F: is the drive letter of your USB drive as reported by list volume)

3. Copy the Windows files from the ISO or other source using robocopy

robocopy.exe E:\ F:\ /MIR

where E:\ is the source and F:\ is the destination. Drag-and-drop or copy/paste can also be used, if you know what you're doing.

Configure your PC to boot from the USB drive

In some machines the USB thumbdrive will appear to the BIOS as any other hard drive. You need to muck with the boot sequence to place the thumbdrive higher in the boot order than the local hard drive.

Note that after you do this you might want to reset the boot order in order to ensure that BitLocker doesn't detect boot changes based on the fact that the thumdrive is missing if it was there when you encrypted your drive.

I have done this only recently - works really well. I have an 8GB usb key with several ISO images on it. When I boot from the key, I get to choose which ISO to boot from. Pretty damn cool. This is all courtesy of GRUB. Instructions here:

http://themudcrab.com/acronis_grub4dos.php

In the example it is showing how to boot a single Acronis recovery ISO, but you can add as many as your key will fit into the menu.lst txt file.

A word of warning though, the ISO images MUST be contiguous on disk (not fragmented) so copy them all at once, and if you have to delete one and/or replace it, you may have to delete all of the ISOs and re-copy them.

You can check to see if the ISO is contiguous by running:

c:> chkdsk z:\myiso.iso

where Z: = your flash key.

Have fun!