Could I install an OS from a usb stick, without a current OS?

Question

I recently put a new harddrive in my laptop, and am trying to install windows xp with a usb stick, But it will tell me to select proper boot device and reboot, but i have set my Boot Device to Removable Device in BIOS (which im not sure entails usb sticks). But still nothing helps
Please help

Answer 1

You have to install an operating system from a CD or DVD in a proper drive. It cannot be done from a USB Flash Drive, Memory Stick or whatever you want to call it.



The reason is that the disc is found by the BIOS [as a drive is part of the boot sequence] while the computer is booting and after you have accepted it will start the installation.



USB slots are one of the last things to be loaded in a normal boot sequence, and seeing that you don't have an OS to start with, the USB will not operate because there are no drivers to make it work in the first place.



You can install other programs from a flash drive because the USBs are working after the OS is installed, but not for an OS initially.

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

I have been able to install Linux onto computers from a USB stick. However, I have not tried installing Windows this way.



You cannot just copy files from the CD / DVD onto the USB stick and expect it to work. You have to also make the stick bootable. This means formatting it with a bootable boot sector. Visit http://blogs.sun.com/dragonfly/entry/dos_bootable_usb_flash_drive to find more information about this.



Once you have your bootable USB stick you can boot from it. I do it by pressing a key (on my computer F11) to open a boot menu when the computer first starts. It then lists all the options I have for booting my computer and I can choose the one I want. The key you would need to press should be displayed for a short time when your computer first comes on. This is not the same as the key to get into SETUP. You are looking for a boot menu option.



Before pressing the boot menu key you should already have your usb drive plugged in. When the menu comes up, or in the BIOS setup menu, you should have an option for USB. If you don't then your computer may be too old to support booting from USB.

Answer 4

hi there

installing a os from a usb depends solely on your motherboards bios spec,if like mine it supports bootable usb devices then you can run any os of a usb stick and linux actually has some distros,s designed for just that,,,,

first of all you need to transfer your os to the memory stick and then makes it bootable...and also not all memory sticks/flash drives will allow you to boot from them.however basically a usb drive that supports usb v2.0 should have no problems booting from a supporting motherboard

One of the requirements for creating our bootable USB flash drive is a Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installation CD. If your Windows XP installation CD doesn't already include Service Pack 2, then you will have to make a CD that includes Service Pack 2 through a technique called slipstreaming.( this is using a program to combine windows xp and sp2 together,however its alot easier to use a sp2 xp disk )

In addition to your Windows XP installation CD, there are a couple of other things that you are going to need. For starters, you will need the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool. you can download one from here (http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197)

Another utility that you are going to need is Bart's Preinstalled Environment Bootable Live Windows CD / DVD, or BartPE for short. You can download this utility for free from the BartPE Web site. ( http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ )

In addition to the software requirements, you must verify that the PC that you will be using to create the Windows deployment has 1.5 GB of free hard disk space (minimum) and supports booting from a USB device. I also strongly recommend that the PC be running Windows XP Service Pack 2. Prior to Service Pack 2, Windows XP sometimes had trouble interacting with USB storage devices.

Now that you have all of the prerequisites taken care of, it's time to actually start setting up our flash drive. The first step in doing so, as strange as it sounds, is to format the flash drive. Windows will actually let you format a flash drive in the same way that you format a floppy disk. However, formatting a flash drive in this way will not work for this project. Furthermore, using Windows to format a flash drive directly has been known to destroy some types of flash drives.

Instead, you must format the flash drive by using the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool that you downloaded earlier. To do so, simply open the utility, select the device followed by the FAT file system option and click Start.

Once the device has been formatted, you must make it bootable. To do so, you must copy the BOOT.INI, NTLDR, and NTDETECT from the root directory of your PC's boot drive to the flash drive. These files are hidden by default, so you will either have to configure Windows Explorer to show hidden files (including protected operating system files) or you will have to open a Command Prompt window and use the COPY command to copy the files.

If you choose to use the Windows Explorer method, then open Internet Explorer and enter C: into the address bar so that you are looking at your local hard drive. Next, select the Folder Options command from the Tools menu. When the Folder Options properties sheet opens, select the View tab. Now, just select the Show Hidden Files and Folders and deselect the Hide Extensions for Known File Types and the Hide Protected Operating System Files check boxes. Click OK to continue.

Now that you have formatted your USB flash drive and installed the boot files onto it, the next thing that you must do is to configure your PC to allow you to boot from the flash drive. This is all done through the computer's BIOS Setup. I can't give you specific instructions for this part, because every computer is different. I can give you a few pointers though.

You can access your computer's BIOS by pressing a specific key immediately after you turn the PC on. The key varies, but it is usually either [F1], [F2], or [Delete]. Once you are in the BIOS Setup, you should verify that all of your computer's USB options are enabled. This might include things like support for legacy USB devices or support for USB 2.0. If there is a time out setting for USB devices, you should set it to the max to insure that the system doesn't time out while waiting on the USB device to boot.

Next, find the section on boot device priority. Normally, a USB flash drive (which is usually listed as USB-HDD, but may be listed as a removable device) will have a very low boot priority. If the USB flash drive's boot priority is lower than the hard disk (listed as HDD) then the only time the computer would ever boot off of the USB flash drive is if the system were to fail to boot from the hard disk. You must therefore rearrange the boot device priority so that the flash drive has a higher priority than the hard drive

Now that we have finally made it through all of the prep wor