Comments on: How To Use a USB Stick to Install Windows Home Server – or anything else for that matter

By: Andrew Edney

Andrew Edney — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 23:03:29 +0000

Paul

I have followed my own steps countless times and never had a problem or needed to select a volume.

In your steps you listed above (the last batch) how can you select vol 1 (3rd line) because at that point you shouldnt actually have a volume!

Does your pen drive have any U3 software or partitions on it? Basically something that makes the drive have multiple volumes even after the clean?

Andrew

By: Paul

Paul — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 22:59:11 +0000

I tried following the described steps, but still ran into a problem.

I did the following on a Vista 64 system. Find my USB stick.

diskpart
list disk

My USB stick was disk #1.

select disk 1
clean
create partition primary

At this point I got the following error message. “There is insufficient free space to create a partition at the specified size and offset. Specify different size and offset or don’t specify either to create the maximum sized partition.”

However, after doing the following commands.

select vol 1
clean
create partition primary

It succeeded in creating the partition and then I was able to format it. So it appears that the order of the commands should be (assuming that your USB stick is disk #1).

select disk 1
clean
select vol 1
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Disclaimer: I didn’t go back and try this from scratch, but it’s an approximate recounting of what I did.

By: Acer Aspire Revo R3610 review « MS Windows Home Server

Acer Aspire Revo R3610 review « MS Windows Home Server — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:58:03 +0000

[...] little bit of work upfront. Firstly, as the R3610 has no optical device, so you will need to make a USB copy of your WHS installation CD or alternatively obtain a external USB CD ROM [...]

By: Andrew Edney

Andrew Edney — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:32:00 +0000

If you follow the steps above you can install Windows – yes.

Andrew

By: Rafael

Rafael — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:25:04 +0000

You’re telling me you can install things from a USB stick WITHOUT using Bootsec?

By: Andrew Edney

Andrew Edney — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:37:03 +0000

thanks Jon

By: Jon

Jon — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 03:05:41 +0000

Bravo Andrew, many thanks for a job well done.

Jon

By: RIchard

RIchard — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:07:33 +0000

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.

By: Tim

Tim — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 19:19:39 +0000

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!

By: Andrew Edney

Andrew Edney — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:17:48 +0000

Justin

No – you need to copy the files from the ISO to the drive for it to work.

Andrew

By: Justin

Justin — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 00:02:34 +0000

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?

By: VIA NSD-7800 Review « MS Windows Home Server

VIA NSD-7800 Review « MS Windows Home Server — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 20:15:55 +0000

[...] With the monitor dutifully connected, the installation of Windows Home Server still presents a couple of challenges. For one thing, the lack of a built-in CD/DVD drive presents you with an initial hurdle of how to install the operating system. This is of course easily remedied with either a USB DVD drive or by transferring the WHS installation media over to a USB memory stick. [...]