If you followed the methods in my earlier post, upon unplugging the hard drive from the computer’s USB port you would have been unable to boot to the newly installed Operating System. Keeping the drive tethered to your computer is probably not what you had intended. There’s a simple procedure that fixes this!

In my example, the USB Installer is on Drive D:\, and the operating system is installed  to the desired Drive C:\.

Step 1 — Open a command prompt with administrative privileges. To do so, open the Start Menu, and type “CMD” in the search prompt. Right-Click on the resulting program and “Run as Administrator”. This will invoke UAC as configured.

Step 2 — In the command prompt, type the following command:

bcdboot C:\Windows /s C:

Step 3 — Open up Disk Manager. To do so, right click on the “Computer” hotlink in the start menu (or your “My Computer” if you’ve added it to the desktop) and select “Manage”. Again, this will invoke UAC as configured. On the Explorer Window you are presented with, the left pane will contain Disk Manager. Click it once to open it to the main pane.

Step 4 — Mark the C:\ Partition as Active by right clicking on the graphical map and selecting “Mark Partition as Active..” from the context menu.

Step 5 — Unmount the USB drive (Eject first), and reboot. All Done!

If you don’t have a DVD drive in your computer you might have a hard time converting that .ISO into a usable method to install Windows 7. Fortunately, I have a method that works using a USB-connected Hard Drive.

Step 1 – Collect the iso images.

Step 2 – Install Virtual Drive that can read .iso images. I use VirtualCloneDrive from Elaborate Bytes. Freeware that works well. I’ve also used Daemon Tools in the past.

Step 3 – Partition and format your hard drive. Partition an 8GB section of the hard drive you’re planning to use and format it with the FAT32 file system.

Step 4 – Mount the ISO and copy the files to the newly created partition using XCOPY

xcopy [SOURCE]:\* [DESTINATION]:\* /e

Step 5 – Mark the partition as active. Right click on your Computer and select “Manage”. Go to Disk Management, right click on your new partition, select “Mark Partition as Active”.

Step 6 – Reboot and select your USB Hard Drive as your boot device. All BIOSes are different so the process is not documented here.

You will need to follow up with my next post to complete the whole process and be able to disconnect your hard drive.