Saturday, January 12, 2013

Saturday Linkfest - Cold Pizza Edition

The other night on my way home from work, I was tired and exhausted. I didn’t feel like going grocery shopping for dinner so I punted.

I stopped by the pizza parlor, grabbed three large pies. We ate one for dinner, then have been snacking on cold-pizza leftovers for the past two days.

I’m almost out of slices so I guess it will be to the grocery store tomorrow for some real food again.

USB-based Windows System Install Options

The other day at work, a co-worker asked me for some feedback on a particular problem they had at home.

Seems that he had decided to upgrade (actually a fresh install) a laptop from Windows XP to Windows 7. Only problem was the CDROM drive was in pretty bad shape, and all he had was optical install disks. So how could he get the upgrade on.

Although I supposed he could find an external USB-based CD/DVD-ROM drive to use, that seemed like an unnecessary purchase. He did have a working Windows desktop system, however, so the solution seemed quite simple: create a bootable USB drive with the installation media present. Boot the laptop from the USB drive and install away!

So here are three methods to accomplish that task; full-hands on, Windows tool, and automated utilities.

If you are game and want to learn a bit of the structure of creating such a tool, then this TechRepublic post is perfect: How do I ... create an installation flash drive for Windows 7? I noticed it doesn’t have instructions to make the partition/device bootable via bootsect. BOOTSECT /NT60 <usb drive letter>    (Where <usb drive letter> equals your USB device).

Microsoft has a nice and simple tool to assist you with the process: Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool.  This guide How To Create Bootable Windows 7 USB To Install Windows 7 From USB Flash Drive (Using Windows 7 DVD/USB Tool) from Into Windows provides a nice walkthrough of the process.

Finally, there are some specialized utilities that give you a bit more control over the creation process. I particularly like these two:

Piece of cake.

ForSec Bits

Installing Stuff

Tips for Techs

Network Monitoring

Tools, Utilities, and Updates

Firefox News

Cheers!

--Claus Valca

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