Windows Web hosting, Web Technologies, etcFollow me on TwitterRSS Feeds Household About Me Windows 2008 arrives only on DVD and nowadays you’d think every computer has a DVD drive by default,
Office Professional Plus 2010, unfortunately most servers are ordered without them and that causes a problem obviously. Your choices would be to break the DVD into CD-ROMs (not fun) install over the network (a little more work than I wanted to do) or find another means to get it up. My solution,
Office 2007 Product Key, USB Thumb drive
Since Vista and Windows 2008 share the same code base, I figured someone must have found a way to boot vista off a thumb drive so I looked and found just that. Kurt Shintaku has a how-to on how to install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive.
Before you begin though,
Office 2007 Key, if your thumbdrive has U3 installed on it, you’ll probably want to remove that (I did just to be certain),
Windows 7 Home Premium, here’s instructions on how to do that:
Using Kurt’s instructions this is all it took:
Format the thumb drive from a DOS prompt execute: diskpart list disk select disk 1 (assuming disk 1 was your thumb drive in the above list disk command) clean create partition primary select partition 1 active format fs=fat32 assign exit
Copy the Win2008 install files xcopy d:*.* /s/e/f e: (assumes your dvd is drive D: and your thumb drive is drive E:,
Microsoft Office 2010 Key, adjust accordingly)
That’s all it took other than verifying the server BIOS was set to boot off of the USB device.