VIDEO How to install Windows 7 onto a netbook that has no support for booting from USB flash

[dgordon]

I have a netbook whose harddrive has crashed. It has no CD/DVD drive and does not supports booting from USB flash drives but does support booting from USB floppy or USB CDROM drives. The problem is that I don't have neither a USB floppy nor a USB CRROM drive. Therefore the only viable option for me (I think) was to put my installation files onto the replacement drive make it bootable and install from the replacement drive unto itself as per the instructions given in this video: Clean Installing Windows 7 from Hard Disk - YouTube ie copy the windows installation unto the drive and making the drive bootable. Unfortunately everything works out fine up to the point of making the hard drive bootable. I have tried bootsect c:, bootsect /nt60 c:, bootsect /nt60 c: /force to no avail. Any suggestions as to how to get the machine installed are welcomed.Thanks

 

[Saltgrass]

Is it your netbook not allowing a Flash Drive boot, or is the flash drive set up incorrectly?

Could you go through the process you used to configure the flash drive? Do you know if the Netbook is using an MBR or UEFI type of install?

Does it have an option to boot from the network?

 

[dgordon]

Saltgrass,

Thank you very much for your reply.

Actually at first I didn't even try booting from a flash drive because I assumed (incorrectly) that since the BIOS had only two USB devices (floppy and CDROM) listed as boot options that a flash drive boot was not supported. I have since created a bootable flash and successfully installed Windows 7 on the netbook from it using the boot from CDROM boot option.

The fact that a USB flash boot option wasn't explicitly listed in the BIOS boot option coupled with there being a distinction between booting from two other USB device types is what misled me.