Installing Windows from a Bootable USB stick

I was recently tasked with setting up a quick method for provisioning new physical servers/workstations. I have a Server2008 R2 AD forest with VMWare VSphere for virtual machine server infrastructure.

Virtual machines are provisioned via template images from the Virtual Center server, but with almost our entire infrastructure virtualised there are only a handful of physical machines to worry about. They are all workstations that will likely only be rebuilt once a year with most of the configuration done via group policy. With that in mind I didn’t want to use a dedicated deployment method such as Microsoft’s BDD (Business Desktop Deployment Services). The added infrastructure, image creation, image maintenance and overall setup just didn’t seem worth it for so few machines.

Its always best to keep things simple so with that in mind I chose a straight install from a bootable USB stick. The main reasons for this method were:

• You don’t need a DVD drive in the machine
• It doesn’t stream the installation over the network
• Installation is from flash media so installation is quicker
• No need to create and maintain images
• Simple!

 Once the USB stick is bootable you can install a copy of windows simply by extracting the files from a windows installation DVD onto the stick and booting from it. A shared folder containing the appropriate OS ISO files, a couple of bootable USB sticks and some well placed group policies are all you need for quick/easy deployments.

To make a USB stick bootable, insert your USB stick (need at least 4GB to hold the binaries for anything past XP/2003), open elevated CMD/Powershell and run the following commands:

1. diskpart
2. list disk
3. select disk %INSERT NUMBER ASSIGNED TO YOUR USB STICK%
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=ntfs
9. assign
10. exit

 Once that is complete, mount your windows ISO (or use a physical drive if you choose), go back to your elevated prompt and run the following:

1. cd boot
2. bootsect.exe /NT60 F:

 Example:

Your USB key is now bootable. You can copy the binaries from your windows ISO onto it and install.

Go forth and deploy!