Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive at Kevin’s Blog

Creating Bootable Vista / Windows 7 USB Flash Drive

It surprised me to find that there are very few dead-simple guides to creating a bootable USB thumb/pen/flash drive for a Vista and/or Windows 7 installation. I cobbled together the following from VistaPCGuy and another source I don’t remember right now.

Comments:

This works great but is somewhat overstated now. There are other good instructions out there. But none better so I’ll give him that. This one does describe formatting the USB drive in NTFS, a little thing but handy if you are not proficient in this stuff.

Something that is not mentioned is running the bootsect command being 64/32 bit specific. To do a 64 bit setup you must be on a 64 bit machine. You can set up Win7 using a Vista machine and visa versa.

This is slick and installs are faster than DVD assuming your USB drive and interface is advanced enough. Use an 8GB drive and have plenty of room for your portable programs, Mozbackup, and whatever else you need for easy prep.

Here is the lazy man's way of doing it with UNetbootin. <link> I have not tried this one and don't know if it formats the drive or how it formats.