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7 Steps to Make a Bootable USB Thumb Drive to Install Windows 7 on a Netbook

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

I recently bought a Netbook, a lovely Acer Aspire One, however it came with Windows XP and since falling in love with Windows 7, I couldn’t bear to use XP anymore.

So I went searching for the steps to make a bootable USB thumb drive with the Windows 7 install files on it, and got lucky when I found an excellent 7 step guide on CrunchGear. I’d recommend going to view that if you need the steps explained all along the way. But I’ll put them here, short and sweet.

Since you can’t download the Release Candidate anymore that eliminates the first step.
The second step is to download WinRAR, I use and recommend 7-Zip for all your unzipping needs, and it does the same job we need it to do in step 3.
The third step is to extract the files from the ISO you downloaded (hopefully before Microsoft stopped offering it for download in August).
Next step is to format your thumb drive to NTFS, and you need at least a 4GB thumb drive for the Windows 7 install files.
That was pretty easy right? Now the hard part. Basically copy the bootsect.exe file from the /boot subfolder in the Windows 7 directory you created in step 3 to your C: drive
Open the command prompt and go to the C: drive (or wherever you copied the bootsect.exe file), and type in this command:
“bootsect /nt60 f:”

(without the quotes and replace ‘f’ with the letter of your thumb drive)

That should copy the Windows 7 boot files to the thumb drive, then…
Copy the Windows 7 files to the thumb drive

That’s it. It worked beautifully for me and I’m now enjoying Windows 7 on my new Acer netbook. Everything works great and I can’t wait for the final version of Windows 7 to come out on October 22nd.

Mark your calendars. Mine is already marked.

Read the original 7 step guide at CrunchGear

Tags: flash drive, guide, information, microsoft, tips, usb, Windows, Windows 7