Around here we love when someone comes along and creates an application to take even the simplest processes and refines them into an even easier single solution. Previously we covered creating your own bootable USB Windows 7 installation manually and today we’ve got a couple of applications that make the entire process a snap. Even better, both applications are entirely free of charge. Installing Windows 7 from USB makes the perfect method for installation on that home-brew movie streaming box in the bedroom or even a drive-less main media center machine.The first application is from Tweaking with Vishal which provides a very streamlined interface for creating your new bootable Windows 7 installation. To get started you’ll need to download and install the program either from the askvg.com page or through our Hack7MC mirror of the program. By default the installation will create a desktop icon from which you can launch the program.
On the first run of the program a handy Help guide will appear walking you through the steps to create your new installation disk. The process is incredibly simple, first insert the USB drive into the USB port. Next press the Check USB button and select the disk from the dropdown box. After selecting the proper drive press the Format USB button, note that if you’d prefer to do a fast format saving quite a bit of time be sure to enable it in the Options before pressing the Format button.
After formatting has completed select whether you’d prefer to create the installation from a DVD drive or an ISO file. This is a handy feature that the other program we’ll be looking at doesn’t have, the ability to copy files from inside an ISO without mounting it first. After choosing ISO or DVD and selecting the proper location of the files press the Start button to begin the process of copying the files to the USB drive. This will take some time depending on the disk’s speed and whether or not the program will need to extract files from an ISO.
Afterward you should now have a complete Windows 7 installation USB drive. Just pop it into the destination machine, make sure that the BIOS is set to boot from USB and get started.
The next program we’ll be looking at is WintoFlash, a program first featured on Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows. The process with this program is fairly similar. Begin by downloading and extracting the program (Hack7MC mirror) to your hard drive then launch the wintoflash.exe file to begin. Once opened you’ll have the choice of running the program as a wizard or manually by selecting the Welcome! or Task tab.
Under the Task option, select the option to transfer Vista/2008/7 setup to flash. The next screen will prompt you for the USB drive type, file system format and format type. The default selections are adequate and shouldn’t need changed. Under the setup files path you will need to select the DVD drive or mounted ISO image to load the files from. As mentioned earlier this program doesn’t offer the option to load an ISO file directly. Next select the location of your USB drive and press Create to get the process started.
Another super simple way to transfer Windows 7’s setup to a flash USB drive! Both these programs performed quite well for the task they were designed to perform though the “A bootable USB” program’s ISO option certainly gives it an edge.
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