Habitually Good

I got my new laptop finally, and the first thing I did was to install Windows 7 on it. Now since my new laptop is on the lighter side, it doesn’t have a built-in optical drive, which means that either I connect an external DVD drive, or I find another way.

A quick search reveals that it is pretty straight forward to install Windows 7 using a USB stick. However, various sites ask you to perform various different steps in order to get it going. And not everything works for everyone. Here are the most simple steps that you can follow and hope that it works for you.

Before you begin, please note that if you are using Vista, make sure that you do all steps as administrator (far too many people have been frustrated by not remembering this).

• Step 1: Collect your material – download the ISO image for the Windows 7 version that you want to install (at the time of writing, you need to be lucky enough to have a source such as an MSDN subscription). Get hold of a USB stick, which is at least 4GB in size.
• Step 2: Prepare the USB stick – make sure that you have no data on this disk. Simply go to your My Computer, locate the stick, right click and choose Format.
• Step 3: Copy the files – you need to make use of any number of ISO programs (WinRAR, MagicISO, etc.) to extract all the files of the ISO image onto the USB stick.
• Step 4: Make the USB Bootable – this is probably the most confusing step of all, so read carefully. First up, you need to have a machine which is the same target platform as the Windows 7 that you are trying to install (x86 or x64). If you are installing Win7 x64, then find a machine which is running Windows x64 and do the following (similar if you are running x86):
• 4.1 – on the USB stick find the folder called boot.
• 4.2 – copy the file called bootsect.exe to some place on your x64 machine (let’s say C:\).
• 4.3 – now, go to command prompt (remember to do this as administrator in Vista).
• 4.4 – change directory to wherever you copied the file, and execute the following command: bootsect /nt60 E: (here E: is the drive letter that Windows has assigned to your USB stick). Make sure when you are doing this, there is no explorer window open that is viewing files on the USB drive, as you will get an Access Denied error.
• Step 5: Boot with USB – now, simply plug-in your USB stick into the USB port of the target computer, and reboot. While booting up, access your BIOS and configure it to boot from the USB rather than your hard disk. It should start loading the installer from the USB upon reboot.

That is it. The one thing was good is that once I got the USB stick ready, the actual setup was very fast, since the USB stick is faster than the optical drive.

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