Installing a OS without a DVD drive?

[Andrewsonfire]

All i have is a couple old IDE dvd burners and there are no IDE ports on my mother board.

Only spot in town to get a sata dvd drive is selling it for 80 bucks.

 

[redduc900]

Via a USB flash drive...

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=653851

 

[jsaleen]

You can also make a small partition on your main or secondary hard drive and copy the windows dvd to it and make it bootable. Then you have a built in back up of your OS disk, it installs alot faster too.

Copying over the network if you have another PC may be your best option.

 

[habbajabba]

WinToFlash works excellent. It does however require an internet connection to OK the eula. All you have to do is unplug it (the flash drive) in between each automatic reboot.
http://wintoflash.com/home/en/
It's almost a 20mb folder unpacked, whereas universalusb and unetbootin are single exe's and from my experience weren't that great on execution. I've tried the windows7usb tool also and it failed-not surprisingly.

 

[Neuromancer]

I install all OS from USB now, it is SOOOO much faster.

Full install with hard disk format in 7 minutes

Really easy with windows 7. Copy disk content to a USB flash drive (I use NTFS for win7 but you can use FAT as well) then CLI bootsect to make the drive bootable.

Most guides will tell you to use diskpart to format the stick. Way faster to just format it with the windows utility. Have not used CLI for formatting in over a year and have not had any problems.

 

[Jmtyra]

http://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=653851

[/URL]

If you're installing Windows 7, there is an easier way, no command line required:
Windows 7 USB Tool (Microsoft Link)