Administrator It

Location:

Posted:

September 07, 2010

Now we’re going to open the Command Prompt. If you’re using Vista or Windows 7,

you’ll have to do the “Run as administrator” thing or we won’t be able to deploy our

sweet flanking maneuvers that are coming up. So go into Programs > Accessories and

then right-click on Command Prompt and choose “Run as administrator.”

Once we’ve got the Command Prompt up, we’re going to switch to our top-level C:

folder by simply typing “cd\” without the quotes and hitting Enter (If you skipped Step

Five above, then navigate yourself to the “boot” folder inside the extracted ISO folder on

your desktop).

We should then have a straight-up C:> prompt. At this point, we’ll type the following

(without the quotes):

“bootsect /nt60 f:”

We’re assuming the drive letter of your USB thumb drive is F:, so replace “f:” in the

above phrase with whichever letter is assigned to your particular thumb drive. Hit enter

and you should see:

Blah, blah, blah your bootcode is something something. This just means that the thumb

drive is now ripe to auto-load when you boot up your computer.

Step Seven: Copy the Windows 7 files to the thumb drive

This is it! The final step! Open up your extracted Windows 7 gobbledygook folder and

copy the files over to your thumb drive. You should be copying five folders and three

files to the thumb drive. That is, don’t drag the gobbledygook folder over; open it up first

and drag the stuff inside of it over instead.

It’ll take maybe about ten minutes for everything to copy over. Take another break!

You’ve earned it!

When all is said and done, reboot your computer with the thumb drive in place and you

should be greeted with the Windows 7 installation menu. If you’re not, you might have to

tweak your BIOS settings to allow your computer to recognize a thumb drive as a

bootable device.

Questions? Comments? Rage?

I hope this little guide helps. I’ll try to answer any questions left in the comments section.

Also, if any of you out there are programmers, this whole setup is itching for some sort of

automation process – something where a user could load up a program, select their thumb

drive and Windows 7 ISO file and have the rest done automatically.

You’d be doing the world a great service.

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/21/seven-steps-to-a-bootable-windows-7-thumb-

drive/