How can I copy my Windows 7 installation DVD
to a USB thumb drive?

Netbooks and some notebooks do not include DVD drives. For that reason, the owner may wish to copy the Windows 7 installation DVD to a thumb drive. The drive must be at least 8 GB. Dennis Chung at Microsoft provides the following directions:

• First, you’ll need the DiskPart utility on the system you will use to prep the thumb drive.
• This is a free disk partitioning utility that is likely already installed on your Windows system.
• If not, you can download DiskPart here.
• Launch the DiskPart utility by typing diskpart at the Start Menu.
• Then run the list disk command to check the status of your drive.
• Now run select disk 1 where the "1" is actually the corresponding number of your USB drive
• Run clean.
• Once the thumb drive is clean, you can run create partition primary.
• Now make the partition active by entering active
• Then you need to set up the file system as Fat32 by running format fs=fat32 quick (quick, of course, specifies that you want to perform a quick format to speed up the process).
• Entering the assign command gives the USB drive a drive letter, making it easy to access from Windows Explorer

Then you can copy everything from the Windows 7 installation DVD onto the USB key (a simple drag and drop will do).

Now you can insert the thumb drive into the system you want to install Windows 7 onto and boot the system. The installation will now proceed as usual—but faster.