Saturday, July 16, 2011

Create Multiboot USB Drive: Install Windows 7, XP From Same USB Drive

Earlier, we have covered some tutorials: 1.How to install windows XP From USB Drive 2. How to install Windows 7 From USB Drive. Both the processes work fine and the readers feedback was positive. But there were some drawbacks with those procedures:
1. Previous methods of creating of the bootable USB drive for Windows XP involves numbers of steps and takes lot of time to complete.
2. You are to use the similar Operating System to prepare the USB disk. i.e if you want to prepare your USB drive to install Windows XP, you’ll have to use Windows XP to apply the preparation method. The similar condition is applicable when preparing the USB drive for Windows 7.
3. Those methods do not have any option to prepare the USB disk in such a way that it would install both Windows XP and Windows 7 after spending one time effort.
But we found an awesome free utility WinSetupFromUSB which comes across  drawbacks and allows you to create a Multiboot USB drive to install Windows XP and Windows 7 from the same USB drive. No need to prepare your USB stick separately. Even the tool works in both Windows XP and Windows 7.

Creating the Multiboot USB Drive for Windows 7 and XP

Creating the multiboot USB drive is too easy and involves four simple steps. Before getting into the process, make sure that the USB drive that you have, is minimum 4 GB of volume (recommended 8 GB) and formatted with FAT32 file system. Once you are ready, download WinSetupFromUSB and extract at any location of your computer.
Then follow the steps below:
1. Insert the formatted USB drive in the USB post of your computer and run the WinSetupFromUSB_1-0-beta7.exe.
2. Make sure that the the utility has detected your USB drive.
3. Now enable the option Windows 2000/XP/2003 Setup selecting the check box and browse to the Windows XP installation file location. Next, enable the option Vista/7/Server 2008 Setup/PE/RecoveryISO and browse to the Windows 7 installation files’ location. In both of the cases, if you have the ISO images, extract them by WinRar or 7-Zip.
4. Click the Go button to get started. It might take several minutes.
Though we have discussed the process for only Windows XP and Windows 7, you can also add Windows Vista as well as Linux.

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