Trying to use usb to boot with W7 Ultimate

[neworldman]

I have a usb 3.0 64 gb flash drive I want to put W7 Ultimate on and boot from it... I use WinUSB Maker and it said it installed correctly... But when I try to boot from USB it asks to install windows and only gives me the other hard drives beside my usb drive to install to.. Is there a trick to this? Do I need to change something in my BIOS for it to show my USB drive? How do I install W7 on this USB? My pc runs W7 x64 ultimate now.. It has one SSD drive for main boot and one ssd drive and two 2tb Sata drives for storage. I have a W7 dvd to install...

Thanks

[neworldman]

Ok I miss understood what the WinUSB Maker does... It is only for PC or laptops without cd/dvd so they can reinstall windows got it.... Sorry.. I am a idiot..

[fritzi93]

I don't think it's possible to run Win7 from a USB stick like you'd run one of the Linux live CDs. Not a stupid question though. (And if someone knows a way, I'd be curious to read about it).

Anyway, the WinUSB maker didn't work for me for whatever reason. But the command line method works perfectly. In case someone runs across this thread and wants to know how, here it is:

http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

[magillagorilla]

I don't think the Windows installer recognizes anything on the USB bus as a viable install drive. You may be able to ghost an existing Windows install then unpack the image on to a USB stick. This is not something I have tried. I also assume Windows is not going to be happy when it wakes up in an entirly new hardware environment.

Related to the topic, I has this old 80GB drive with Ubuntu installed on it from a very old Dell machine. I poped the drive out and put it in a totally different box , an old Shuttle XPC. Ubuntu booted up without a single error and all the hardware worked. Incredible operating system.

[fritzi93]

Oh no, you can install Win7 from USB alright, I've just done it on a netbook. You make the USB thumb drive bootable using the method I posted above, then copy the files from the install disc to the USB drive.

As to restoring an image, I've used the WD and Seagate versions of Acronis to restore from a USB drive no problem. (You need to create a separate bootable USB drive to boot up Acronis, easy enough to do from within the Acronis program). Same thing for Macrium free, and it works much the same way. I had to use Macrium on a netbook with a Hitachi hard drive in it (Christmas present for a relative).

[Constant Gardener]

You can also use a free program, RT 7 Lite, to do this and considerably more, such as slipstreaming service packs and extracting other versions of Win7.

[magillagorilla]

My post was confusing. I was trying to think of a way to run Windows from a thumb drive not just install. It's been a while since I used such tools but you may be able to ghost a windows install and restore it on a thumb drive thus creating a working image of Windows on the drive. To what purpose, I don't know.

[El Heggunte]

...
I was trying to think of a way to run Windows from a thumb drive not just install.

Well, you'd need to find a way to "convince" Windows that the thumb drive is the unit C:, to begin with.

Anyway, such "portable Windows" would kill the thumb drive much sooner than the expected, I guess.

[magillagorilla]

"C:" is an abstraction layer. My BIOS will let me pick the drive that has my OS on it. I imagine Windows would make its root drive C: once the OS is running. Just like when you boot to DOS from a CD and it creates a RAM drive. The RAM drive becomes C:. I always appreciated the LINUX drive convention hda0, hda1... and so on. These are absolute drive designations based on how the BIOS has arranged the disks.

Anyhow, you are right. Win7 would kill a flash drive quick. Linux live variations create a RAM drive to operate from.