Can i boot windows 7 from a usb drive

Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Tim Fisher. VP and General Manager, Lifewire. Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn. Updated on December 02, Tweet Share Email.

Pick the en-US. Any data you have on this USB drive will be erased as part of this process. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up.

There was an error. Tell us why! Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Asked 12 years ago. Active 9 years, 4 months ago. Viewed 35k times. Improve this question. Peter Mortensen Console Console 2, 3 3 gold badges 22 22 silver badges 21 21 bronze badges.

Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Could you add some more detail? I've been looking into this for a few days, so I can save you a step here.

You can get an installed copy there via other means, but it won't help you, because: "Windows 7 will not boot from a USB drive. Orwellophile Orwellophile 5 5 silver badges 9 9 bronze badges. System image backup your physical machine Install Virtual Box Create a virtual machine. Power down physical machine and remove all internal drives Boot physical machine from external drive.

On installing to the USB. Another catch is that not every flash drive will get the job done. The flash drive's capacity is actually a limiting factor though. Your flash drive can't be too large or too small. Recommend that your flash drive be at least a minimum of MB in size. The flash drive that you use for this project can be no larger than 2GB, because you will have to format the flash drive using the FAT file system, which has a 2GB limit.

Presently, you are stuck using FAT because most computers will not recognize a flash drive as being bootable if the drive is formatted with anything other than FAT Microsoft offers USB-bootable Windows 7 for netbooks Microsoft has kept netbook and other optical drive-less PC owners in mind with a new downloadable version of its just-released Windows 7 operating system.

All data on this USB will be erased, please make a backup in advance. If you plan to create a brand-new system, you need to download Windows 7 ISO file. When you prepare the things listed above, you can follow the steps below to create bootable Windows 7 USB. Step 1. Step 2. Then, select Windows To Go Creator. Step 3. Step 4.