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/