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John Paul Cook

Installing Windows Server 2008 the Green Way

From an environmental standpoint, it's undesirable to use a physical DVD for installing an operating system. It's also not necessary. Instead of installing Windows Server 2008 R2 beta from a DVD, I used a USB flash drive.

A USB flash drive can be made into a substitute for a DVD in just three easy steps without using DISKPART commands.

1. Attach the USB drive. Format it as NTFS.

2. Mount your iso file using MagicDisc, Daemon Tools, or Virtual CloneDrive (my recommendation).

3. At an elevated command prompt, enter the following:

   xcopy d:\*.* /s /e /h /f g:\

    where:
         D is the drive letter for your mounted iso file (this could also be a physical optical drive with an actual DVD) 
         G is the drive letter for your USB flash drive.

    If your drive letter mappings are different, make the appropriate substitutions.

    XCOPY switches are described here.

4. Attach your USB drive to the machine in question and boot. You may have to go into setup to force the machine to boot from the USB device. You may also have to enable booting from USB in the BIOS.

In addition to using USB flash drives, you can use laptop drives attached via a USB adapter or external hard drive case. Not only will you save the environment, you will also save time because optical devices are relatively slow. I typically have old laptop drives preformatted and ready for an XCOPY.

Published Sunday, January 18, 2009 8:10 PM by John Paul Cook

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AaronBertrand said:

Funny you bring this up, I found this method on someone else's blog earlier tonight, tried it, and it didn't work with 2008 x64 R2.  I used MagicISO to mount the ISO and then copied to the USB drive.  When I rebooted the computer, even though I told BIOS to boot from USB device first (and it recognized the USB device according to the BIOS), it still said no boot device found.

So what I ended up doing was booting from an old Vista x64 SP1 DVD, making some partitions (including a modest 20 GB partition), and installing Vista x64 there.  Then I was able to run the Server 2008 x64 R2 setup right from the USB drive.  Obviously I can blow away the Vista partition once I'm up and running, but I may keep it around (since I don't need the space) or I may upgrade it to Windows 7 at the next milestone (though I may not have made the partition big enough for that :-\).

Thankfully this is just an old Dell OptiPlex, and I don't really care if everything works out all right, I am just trying to build a tmporary makeshift machine to use at work while I rebuild an aging workstation at my office.  This machine is several years old, but it has a Core 2 Duo and 8 GB of RAM, and I just swapped out the 160 GB drive for a 1 TB (the new, green albeit slower drive from Western Digital), so it should suit quite nicely as a temporary solution.  (The machine at work is a little newer but is still running 2003 32-bit and is not taking kindly to upgrading, hence the need to rebuild.  Time to clean out some cobwebs anyway.)

January 18, 2009 9:17 PM
 

John Paul Cook said:

As you pointed out in email, you used FAT32. My tests were only with NTFS.

January 19, 2009 8:00 PM
 

AaronBertrand said:

Right, I followed the advice here:

http://www.ditii.com/2009/01/13/how-to-install-windows-7-beta-1-without-a-dvd-drive-installation-guide-tips-tutorial/

I'm ashamed to admit I didn't know that you could format a USB drive with NTFS and just used what the author did.  No matter, I got everything installed anyway (in fact dual boot Win7 + Win2008 R2) and now I'm just working on making the latter more like a workstation...

January 19, 2009 9:58 PM
 

John Paul Cook said:

I checked out the link. I used to do it that way, but I found all of those DISKPART commands to be unnecessary.

January 20, 2009 6:45 AM

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About John Paul Cook

SQL Server MVP based in Houston, Texas. Contributing author to SQL Server MVP Deep Dives and SQL Server MVP Deep Dives Volume 2. John is currently on sabbatical from database consulting and is very busy as a full-time nursing student.
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