Windows 7 installation guide – Part 1

Written by Narmad

I am sure you guys must have heard about the latest version of Windows, Windows 7. The OS has been in news for the last few months and some of you might have already tried your hands at Windows 7. Having Windows 7 on your desktop is very easy, but due to resource limitations, installing Windows 7 on netbooks is no simple task! Don't worry, there are some tricks and tips to install the OS on your netbooks and notebooks. Read more in this guide.

As 99% of the netbooks don't have DVD drives, you have two options:

1) Get an external USB DVD drive.

2) Arrange a 4GB Flash drive and use it as a bootable media for installation.

What you need?

• A netbook (Minimum 1GB of RAM, 8GB storage space)
• Windows 7 ISO image or bootable DVD.
• A 4GB or larger USB flash drive.
• A Windows machine to prepare the flash drive
• And of course... plenty of time...!

If you can arrange an external USB DVD drive, its great but, if you can't, be ready to shoot some commands and spend some time on turning your flash drive to an installation medium. I assume you are going to install Windows 7 via your flash drive. Here is the step by step guide:

Preparing the USB drive

Before you get started, make sure you have access to a Windows Vista machine. Connect the USB Flash drive to the USB port and follow the steps below:

Click 'Start' - > 'Accessories' and hover on 'Command Prompt'.

Right click on the 'Command Prompt' and select 'Run as administrator'.

Type 'diskpart' and press the Enter key. This will initiate the built in Windows disk partitioning utility.

Type 'list disk' and press the Enter key. Identify which disk is your USB Flash drive.

Here Disk 7 is my USB Flash drive.Type 'select disk 7' and press Enter.

Type 'clean' and press Enter to clean the connected USB Flash drive.

Type 'create partition primary' and hit Enter.

Type 'select partition 1' and press Enter.

Type 'active' and press Enter to make the selected partition active.

Type 'format fs=fat32' and press Enter to format the partition using the FAT32 file system.

To assign a drive letter, type 'assign' and press Enter.

Type 'exit' and you are done!

Once you have successfully executed all the steps mentioned above, you have turned your USB Flash Drive into a bootable storage media. Next, put the Windows 7 Operating System DVD in your computer’s DVD drive and copy all the files from DVD to the USB Flash drive. If you have an image of the OS instead of a DVD, use third pary program like MagicISO to mount the image and copy all the files to the USB flash drive.

In the next part of this series, You'll learn how to proceed with the actual installaion process. As netbooks come with limited storage space, you'll learn how to compress the system files to save disk space. The next part of the article will be out tomorrow, so watch out this space!

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