Many of you may wish to install Windows 7 from a handy USB drive, rather than burning the install files to DVD. These 2 guides give a good overview on how to do this:
Seven steps to a bootable Windows 7 thumb drive:
Seven steps to a bootable Windows 7 thumb drive:
Installing Windows 7 via USB or SD Media:The only tangible thing you’ll need is a USB thumb drive with at least 4GB of capacity. I found a SanDisk Cruzer Contour worked best, while a Kingston DataTraveler was a bit fidgety at first but worked after a couple of tries. It’s all pretty easy once you get going, so let’s begin.
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.