Install Win 7 From Flash Drive

[clocker]

As I've slogged through the summer doldrums, it's been possible to experiment with this flash install on a wider variety of machines- all of which were lesser spec than mine.

It IS possible to flash drive an XP install but only in rare cases.
Most OEM PCs of the XP era simply won't allow booting from a USB device, even when the target HDD and the flash drive are the only devices present.
I disconnect all drives- including optical(s)- not the target of the install. It makes life simpler and subjectively, faster.
Homebuilt machines with higher end motherboards are usually able to boot from USB but can be cranky about nuances during the process.

For example, one PC I tried required that the flash be designated a USB-CD in order to boot and begin the install but then switched in BIOS to USB-HDD during the reboot sequence.
(Otherwise it just cycled through the "loading files" section endlessly).
Basically, older BIOS are just too dumb to know what do with a flash drive
And forget about machines that aren't even USB 2.0 capable.

My hatred of Vista is now so intense that I haven't even tried it on a client yet.
As it is now a large proportion of our intake, I'll probably have to relent soon.

USB install of Win 7- on a new machine, not some jumped up XP survivor- is definitely the way to go.

[Appzalien]

I want same working on windows XP.

clocker said this works on XP some posts above.

This is a pretty nice method, note Windows should take less time to install from a flashdrive, since USB speeds are higher and the seek time is near-zero when compared to an optical drive. Sadly my desktop PC is pretty old and doesn't support booting from USB devices. Well, it's not like I reinstall Windows regularly anyway.

On older PC's you can do what I do. When I first install the OS and before I install too much stuff, I install my Acronis program and make a .tib file of the install (on a secondary drive is best). If I leave out say video card and sound card drivers, I can us the image even if I change cards. Restoring the image (to the machine it was made from) takes about 15 to 20 minutes depending on how much stuff you choose to install. 7Zip doesn't take up too much room and comes in handy when loading the rest of your stuff that might be compressed so I usually put that in the image as well. If you leave out motherboard drivers it will be a slow running PC at first until you install them from your disk, but will allow you to use the image with a new board with out too much trouble as well.