So Windows 7 beta is out the door and you are ready to begin your beta experience. Over the next few months there will be additional builds for Windows 7 (x86 and x64) as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 and that leads to a lot of installs and a lot of DVD burning and useless DVDs as soon as a new build is out. So why not install from USB or whatever other removable media your computer can boot from? Insert your removable media into a Windows XP or Vista PC and run the following commands from an elevated command prompt.
- diskpart
- list disk (find the disk number for the removable media)
- select disk #
- clean
- create partition primary
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=fat32
- assign letter=y (or any free drive letter)
- exit
Once that is complete mount the ISO and run the following command.
xcopy x:\*.* /s/e/f y:\
Where “x” is the drive letter of the mounted ISO. Once complete boot off the device and install the OS. When a new Windows 7 or 2008 R2 build is released, simply delete the contents, rerun the xcopy command and you are ready to go again. As a note this also works for Windows Vista and Server 2008 but you already figured that out 🙂
You can grab the Windows 7 and Server 2008 beta (as of January 9th, 2009) at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ and there are plenty more Windows 7 resources coming to the TechNet Springboard site as well!
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