Its very common for servers to be delivered without a DVD-ROM drive these days and PC’s are not far behind in this regard. Ofcourse you can use a portable DVD drive for installation purposes, but that’s hardly ideal and not very fast. Since modern computers have the option to boot from USB a better approach is to put the install media on a USB drive and install from there.
I have verified that the method below works for the following Windows versions:
- Windows Server 8
- Hyper-V Server 8
- Windows Server 2008 R2
- Hyper-V Server R2
- Windows 7
All you need for this process is a big enough drive (4GB minimum for most install media) and the ISO/Disk of the OS you want to install.
Stick the USB stick in a free USB port on your computer equipped with a Windows OS. For this example I used Windows7 as the Operating System to make this happen.
Open the command prompt (make sure you run the cmd prompt as administrator) and put in the following commands:
diskpart
list disk “list the disk in your system including the USB”
select disk “Disk number”
clean
create partition primary
active
format fs=fat32 quick
assign
exit
Mount the ISO and copy all the content of the desired ISO/Disk to USB stick.
Now the bootable stick is ready for use.
Follow Me