Save Time & DVDs by installing via USB thumb drive

It would be optimal to deploy your physical server OS via PXE/RIS/WDS however there are times that a full base OS install from local media is required. When this happens I highly recommend installing from a USB thumb drive - it's easy to setup (if the server BIOS support USB boot), saves time in finding and then burning an ISO and installs much faster.

NOTE: This process will erase everything on your thumb drive, replacing the data with the installation files for the OS. Also, at leat a 4GB thumb drive is required. 

 To setup a USB thumb drive for either Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 installs you have to prepared the thumb drive using the following commands:

1) From an elevated privileges command prompt (run as administrator) execute 'diskpart'

2) list disk

3) select disk 1 (or the drive number that is your thumb drive, be cautious here and verify that you choose the correct drive)

4) clean

5) create partition primary

6) select partition 1

7) active

8) format fs=fat32

9) assign

10) exit

11) Using your mounted ISO image and/or your installation media:

xcopy d:\*.* /s /e /f e:\  

(the drive letter being the letter of the thumb drive and destination drive letter of your USB thumb drive)

Hopefully these qucik steps and process will save you some time!

-Jeff Amels

MPSC Technical Operations Lead