How To Use a USB Stick to Install Windows Home Server – or anything else for that matter
29. May, 2009 | by Andrew Edney |
27 Comments
Continuing the “How To….” guides, this guide looks at using a USB key to install Windows Home Server, either on a machine that doesn’t have a DVD Drive or just because you can use a USB stick.
In fact, once you have configured the USB Stick, you could use it to install or run anything – Windows Home Server, the WHS Client Restore disc, Windows 7, anything!
All you need for this is a USB Stick with enough space for whatever you need (in the case of Windows Home Server you could get away with a 1GB stick) and a copy of Windows Home Server (or whatever it is you want to install or run).
There are three stages to the process – preparing the USB stick, copy the files to the USB stick and installing the software from the USB stick.
PREPARING THE USB STICK
Plug in the USB stick to your computer/
You need to open a command prompt, but you will need to be acting as an “administrator” to perform these functions. There are two ways of doing this.
The first is to click Start, click Accessories and hover over Command Prompt.
Press the right mouse button and click Run as administrator.
The other way is to click Start, type in CMD and hold down CTRL and SHIFT together and press Enter.
When you are at the Command Prompt, type diskpart.
This will start the built in Windows disk partitioning software.
The next thing you need to do is determine which disk is your USB Stick, so type list disk. In my case I used an 8GB USB Stick so it is showing as Disk 7.
You need to specify that disk, so type select disk 7 (or whatever number the USB Stick is for you).
You then need to clean the USB Stick, so type clean.
You need to create a primary partition so type create partition primary.
You then have to select this partition, and as it is on the only partition on the USB Stick it will be the 1st one, so type select partition 1.
You now need to make that partition active, so type active.
Nearly there – so it’s time to format the USB Stick, and for speed and compatibility reasons its best to go with FAT32 rather than NTFS, so type format fs=fat32.
Depending on the size of your USB Stick this may take a few minutes, so be patient.
The last thing you need to do is assign a drive letter to the USB Stick, so type assign.
Autoplay will also probably kick in at this point and tell you Windows has round a removable disk, in my case Drive M.
Just type exit to finish and then close the command prompt window.
COPYING THE FILES TO THE USB STICK
Put the DVD into your computer and then copy the files from the DVD to the USB Stick (in my case it is the M drive).
INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE FROM THE USB STICK
So now that you have your USB Stick with the relevant software on, it’s time to plug it into the machine you want to install Windows Home Server (or whatever) on. You will need to tell that computer when it power’s up to boot from the USB drive, so check the manual that came with the computer to see how to do that (it is often ESC, or F12, or something similar), you could also change the boot priority in the BIOS, but they you may need to set it back again afterwards so it is often easier just to select the drive at boot time.
And if all goes well you should now be starting the Windows Home Server installation. Just follow the onscreen steps to continue the installation. Good luck!
Author Info
Great instructions … EXCEPT that they don’t work under Vista/32 Ultimate OR on the WHS Desktop. even in Administrator mode. “List”, “Select”. etc. are “not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.”
What version of Windows were you running?
(FYI, I do see the logic behind the command mode steps so I can probably actually do this. But it would have been nice to do it so simply in a command window.
John – I used Windows 7 for the walk through, but it certainly works fine under Vista, I use it all the time, and in fact I just created a new USB stick on Vista/32 Business Edition. I am not sure why this is not working for you. What are the exact steps you performed on your Vista machine? Also I dont understand your last comment? Everything is done from the command prompt.
John – nothing to do with Windows version, diskpart has been around since Win98. Pretty sure you’re getting unrecognized commands because you’re not in the
Disk Partitoner utility.
Run command prompt as Admin & type “DISKPART”
before anything else – everything after that will work.
Thanks Andrew. I’ve seen a lot of sites with this information but none have it as concise and well laid out. Bookmarked for future use!
What if i dont have vista? how can i do this in xp, please answer fast.
Tommy, you do the exact same thing in XP, it works fine.
All my usb sticks are not listed in “list disk” becouse my usb pstick is “take away disk”. how can i change this?
Tommy, I dont understand what you mean by a “take away disk”? If Windows cannot see your USB stick then obviously you cant follow the steps.
If List Disk doesn’t work and doesn’t show your USB stick you can try List Volume, then Select Volume 2 or whatever number your volume is.
Now to make this even easier in the future. Go download nLite and slipstream your windows key into whs and select unattended install and go watch some tv.
This doesn’t work in Windows XP. Windows XP cannot see USB disks as drives in DISKPART.
it works not in XP. I have do it in VirtualBox with Vista
Can someone say that i am possible to boot from USB?
My motherboard is a asus cusl2-m: http://support.asus.com/download/download_item.aspx?product=1&model=CUSL2-M&SLanguage=en-us
Thanks! Great instructions
Best regards!
Do you know if it is possible to install Windows Server 2003 ON an usb stick?
I am running several Ubuntu server on HP Thinclients (1Ghz CPU, 1GB RAM, 16GB-usb sticks) without any problems for years…
Peter
You should be able to install Win 2003 from a memory stick, but I cant say I have tried to install it to a memory stick, but I assume you meant from?
Andrew
First thanks for your quick answer.
And: no, I meant installing Win Server 2003 ON a USB stick.
As far as I have googled there had been guys succesfully installing it on a USB stick, but got blue screens after the first system restart.
Do u have any more hints?
No, sorry, never tried it, never really needed to either.
Let me know how you get on though.
Andrew
Well, XP (SP3, SP2, others?) does have DISKPART, but it’s version of DISKPART will not list USB memory sticks, and DISKPART under XP does not have a FORMAT command.
try this site for an all-in-one solution…
http://wintoflash.com/home/en/
If it works for you, let the world know!
Will just copying an ISO image of WHS to the flash drive work for this purpose? If I set my bios to boot from USB (mine only has the USB FDD, USB ZIP, and USB HDD options), with that ISO on the drive will this work?
Justin
No – you need to copy the files from the ISO to the drive for it to work.
Andrew
This worked like a charm for me. I’d tried a few other sites how to in doing this but totally forgot about having to run as administrator and they never mentioned it. You reminder worked like a charm. Thanks!
Mmm, when I try this my computer says cannot book from this disk (when trying to boot from the USB).
No boot partition on the USB I guess. The USB drive does show as USB-HDD (and not ZIP)
Any ideas? How to get a boot parition on.
Bravo Andrew, many thanks for a job well done.
Jon
thanks Jon