Installing Windows from a thumb drive is vastly superior to burning a copy to a DVD which will fill some landfill somewhere with toxic stuff. Not to mention it's about 50x faster to install Windows from a USB Thumb Drive.
How do you get the bits onto the thumb drive so that you can boot from it and do a clean install?
Best Answer
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 Enterdiskpart
list disk
select disk #
(where # is your USB drive as determined from step 2)clean
(This step will delete all data on your flash drive!)create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
list volume
exit
bootsect.exe /nt60 F: /mbr
(whereF:
is the drive letter of your USB drive as reported bylist volume
)3. Copy the Windows files from the ISO or other source using robocopy
where
E:\
is the source andF:\
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.