How to install Windows 7 or Windows 8 from a USB stick

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on August 19, 2012, that used to be on:

http://beginner.adminramble.com/install-windows-7-windows-8-usb-stick/

Original post:

Here is a small guide how to make a bootable USB pen drive, from a ISO image of Windows setup disk, which you can use to install Windows 7 or Windows 8 on your computer that doesn’t have a DVD drive. The USB stick that is going to be used needs to be at least 4 GB and all the data on it will be erased in the process.

First thing you going to need is Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool that can be downloaded from here. Download the file and install it on your computer.

Run the program and point it to the location of your ISO file, I used the Windows 8 RTM evaluation ISO here.
(If you have a .img file you can just rename the .img extension to .iso, or use a converter like ISOBuddy or MagicISO to convert from some other image format to ISO file)

 

On step 2 choose USB device as the media type.

In step 3 select the drive in which your USB stick is plugged in, press Begin copying and wait for the process to finish.

The tool will reformat your USB stick and put Windows setup files on it.
After it is done you can unplug your stick and install windows on any computer that can boot from a USB ( if a computer is not starting the Windows setup, check your BIOS if it is set to boot from USB before the hard drive).

If you get “We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.” error check this post

Besides Windows 7 USB/Download tool you can also try to use Universal USB Installer

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool error: We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again

This is a repost of a post from an old blog, made on December 19, 2012, that used to be on:

http://beginner.adminramble.com/windows-7-usbdvd-download-tool-error-unable-copy-files-check-usb-device-selected-iso-file/

Original post:

I have written about how to make a bootable USB installer for Windows 7 and 8 by using the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. Sometimes if your USB stick has something in its MBR you might get the error

We were unable to copy your files. Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.

I found the solution to that problem in this post.

You have to start command prompt as an Administrator (On Windows 7 that means right clicking the cmd and selecting Run as Administrator) and use the diskpart utility.

  1. Start command prompt as Administrator and type  diskpart
  2. type  list disk
  3. type select disk  and number of your USB disk ( like select disk 1 )
  4. type  clean
  5. type  create partition primary
  6. type  select partition 1
  7. type  active
  8. type  format quick fs=fat32
  9. type  assign
  10. type exit  to exit the diskpart utility
  11. type exit  to close command prompt
diskpart