Judson's Notes

I want to install Windows 7 on a separation partition but I don't have a DVD drive in my computer. How do I mak a boot thumb drive? It's actually pretty easy:

1. Insert a thumb drive with at least 3GB space
2. Format it as NTFS or Fat32
3. Copy the Windows 7 DVD contents or iso file contents onto the thumb drive
4. Open a command prompt
5. change directories to the thumb drive, for example, type E:\
6. change directories to the boot directory: type cd boot
7. At the command prompt, type: bootsect.exe /NT60 E:

Where the drive letter E is where my USB drive was mounted.

The only caveat is that the final command to write the boot sector to the thumb drive must be done from a machine of the same architecture. So if you are trying to make a thumb drive with 64-bit windows on it, you have to run that command from 64-bit windows.