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.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with Synergy, it is a very essential server/client tool for anyone using multiple computers at their desk. It eliminates the need to have multiple keyboards and mice on your desk, while virtually extending your desktop across Windows, Mac, and Linux environments. You still connect your monitors to the varying computers. I’ve seen seamless Quad-monitor (Three different OSes: WinXP, WinVista with dual monitors, OSX) setups using this program.

This post won’t outline how to use Synergy, but rather just how to take care of the little things that will keep it from being a good experience on Windows Vista/7. I’m writing the rest of this post for those that are already familiar with Synergy, and instructions are targeted at Windows 7 Professional users.

Anyways, I was running into problems with my Synergy client on my home-office setup. I have a laptop docked with a second monitor for my office computer (operating as the Synergy client), and then a single monitor rig in portrait-orientation for my home computer (operating as the Synergy server). I use Display Fusion, which runs as an administrator-level service on my desktop, and I use the multi-monitor taskbar available on the paid version of the software. I was unable to use the Synerg-ized mouse to select a window on that Display Fusion taskbar, and considering that was my 24” monitor where a lot of my work takes place it would be a huge problem if the laptop didn’t have a keyboard. On top of that, every time the client computer would prompt for UAC approval for various things, I would lose the ability to use my G5 mouse and G15 keyboard on my office laptop.

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Having purchased the Windows 7 Professional through the student upgrade program, and with a Windows 7 Launch Party tomorrow, I was anxious to get it installed last night. Even though I ran into a couple of snags with the 64-bit download unpacking to a 32-bit XP system (see “Unloading the Box” error), and will make a post for how to get around that issue later this evening or tomorrow afternoon, I am overall happy with my $30 purchase. I wanted to go over a couple of things that I really enjoy having in a Windows Operating System. Having come from Windows XP (with very little experience in Vista) some of these things are bigger value-adds for me. (more…)