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WinToFlash: Automate making a bootable, USB-based Windows 7 installer

Aug. 31, 2009 Paul Thurrott | Paul Thurrott's Supersite for Windows

Nice! It looks like I have my software pick of the week early this week:

What is WinToFlash

WinToFlash starts a wizard that will help pull over the contents of a Windows installation CD or DVD and prep the USB drive to become a bootable replacement for the optical drive. It can also do this with your LiveCD.

You don't have to worry about scratches on the disc or misplacing your original media discs once you transfer their contents to the flash drive. The optical drive is quickly becoming a thing of the past, especially in office environments, as media is shifted to the cloud.

Note that this works with XP and Vista as well as Windows 7.

Discuss this Article 3

wjglenn141
on Aug 31, 2009
I tried this program out after Lifehacker did a post on it. It does work as advertised. A couple of notes: * It does not work straight from an .iso. It looks for the folder with Windows installation files. So you have to burn the disc or create the folder structure on your hard drive. * It only looks for a certain file in the Windows installation root folder to verify that you have the right folder. It does not check the actual installation files. So if anything is missing, the program won't catch it. Otherwise, nice little program. It does save a few steps.
Waethorn
on Aug 31, 2009
" It does not work straight from an .iso. It looks for the folder with Windows installation files. So you have to burn the disc or create the folder structure on your hard drive." Or use my favourite ISO mounter, Virtual Clonedrive: http://www.slysoft.com/en/virtual-clonedrive.html I even have this running on my server and have shared my servers virtual drivesso that ISO's can be mounted on it and shared across the network. It's damn handy! I don't know why you need a program like this anyway. You can easily use diskpart, clean the USB drive, create a new partition, make it active, format it FAT32 (unless the thumbdrive is over 32GB it should default to FAT32), and then just copy the contents over. Once you create a disk, you no longer need that program anyway, so I don't see the point. If you're really getting this far into creating multiple USB sticks for installing Windows, you probably have enough resources to create a WDS server anyway.
subzerohitman721
on Aug 31, 2009
Very cool find there, Paul. I'm going to have to pass this on to my friends. I think they'd appreciate carrying replaceable USB thumb drives than very valuable Windows Installation disks. Can't wait for the next Windows Weekly.

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