Thursday, February 16, 2012

Installing Windows 2008 via USB Stick

Windows 2008 comes only on DVD and today you’d think every computer has a DVD drive by default, unfortunately most servers are ordered without them and that causes a problem obviously. Your choices would be to break the DVD into CD-ROMs (not fun) install over the network (a little more work than I wanted to do) or find an external USB driven DVD drive.

Here is TWO easy solutions I found from Kurt Shintaku's Blog and Microsoft itself, which I found very useful. 

Solution1: 
Format the thumb drive

  1. from a DOS prompt execute: diskpart
  2. list disk
  3. select disk 1    (assuming disk 1 was your thumb drive in the above list disk command)
  4. clean
  5. create partition primary
  6. select partition 1
  7. active
  8. format fs=fat32
  9. assign
  10. exit

Copy the Win2008 install files

  1. xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\   (assumes your dvd is drive D: and your thumb drive is drive E:\, adjust accordingly)
Solution2: 
You can also simply download and use Microsoft's Windows 7 USB download tool pointing it to the Windows 2008 Server .iso file to create a bootable USB drive.

Here is another link: http://wudt.codeplex.com/

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