Copying the Installation Software

The final step, now that you have your USB flash drive prepared, is to copy the code. You can use a physical installation DVD as the code source in this step or you can use a DVD image that you downloaded from a MSDN, Technet, or Volume License subscription. Just make sure that you extract the ISO DVD image with a tool such as WinRAR (www.rarlabs.com) to a folder on your computer before following the next steps.

You can use some fancy xcopy commands for this step but I found a simple copy and paste works just fine. Navigate to the DVD drive or folder on your computer that has the Windows 7 installation files. Select all the files and then right-click and select Copy.

Navigate to the root of the USB flash drive and select Paste. The file copy can take a number of minutes, but after it is finished you will be able to install Windows 7 fast and on machines that don't have an optical drive.