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Technical Support CommunityFree technical support is available for your desktops, laptops, printers, software usage and more, via our new community forum, where our tech support staff, or the Micro Center Community will be happy to answer your questions online. Show Knowledge BaseHelpful articles written by Micro Center Experts. Guide Oct 2, 2014 10:18 EDT · Hot! If, like us, you have downloaded the Technical Preview for Windows 10, you’ll be itching to try it. But how do you install it from the ISO you’ve just downloaded? Well, read on and find out. Historically, whether you copied Windows 98 to a directory on your C: drive from DOS called win98.src and installed from there, or created a USB boot of Windows 8 direct from the media’s installer, it’s possible to install the Windows OS from a number of mediums. So today, what we’re going to do is show you how to take an 8GB USB disk (4GB can be used for the 32bit edition), prep it for installing Windows 10, transferring the files to it and booting from it. While not a new process, we’ll try to cover as much as possible, just to give you a bit of flexibility when going through this process. First, let’s prep the USB pen. For this, we’ve used a generic USB2 disk and are currently doing this on a Windows 8.1 Pro client. We're using the 64bit Technical Preview. Plug it in to your desktop/laptop and let’s get started! Oh, and be prepared to lose any data on the USB disk, so back it up first if necessary.
At this point we’ve prepped the USB disk for the Windows 10 files and folders. But we need to copy the files to the USB disk. Depending on what OS you’re performing this on (XP, Vista, 7 or 8/8.1) the process will differ slightly. As we’re on Windows 8.1, we’ll detail that process, with additional info thrown in for good measure.
If you don’t have Windows 8/8.1 to mount an ISO, WinRAR will extract contents of an ISO to any location, or you could use a third party tool to mount the ISO(s) like Daemon Tools. Whatever way you can, or know how to, take the ISO contents and place it on your USB disk will be fine. The next thing for you to do is to modify the USB disk for booting. Up until now, it’s still only a non-bootable USB Windows 10 installer.
All that you need to do now is remove the USB media from your computer, plug it into the device you wish to test Windows 10 on, and boot from it. With a bit of luck, you’ll see something like the image below on screen! The above processes will work to create any Windows USB install media, from Vista right up to Windows 10. So if you’re still clinging onto Windows 7 SP1, use this guide to create your USB media. Hopefully the longest process will have been the downloading and/or the copying of the ISO and it’s files to the media. While we know how to run through the process quite quickly, prepping the media from the command line should take no more than 5 minutes. One final thing to note is that if you want to remove Windows 10 from the media and put Windows 7 or 8.1 on there, plug the USB media into the computer where you have 7 or 8.1 media (DVD, ISO, etc), delete all the files/folders from said USB media using Windows Explorer, and copy the 7 or 8.1 files/folders from the ISO or DVD to the USB disk. Simple! As always folks, feedback is much appreciated. How do I manually install Windows 10 from USB?Turn on the PC and press the key that opens the boot-device selection menu for the computer, such as the Esc/F10/F12 keys. Select the option that boots the PC from the USB flash drive. Windows Setup starts. Follow the instructions to install Windows.
How do I make my USB bootable from Command Prompt?To create a bootable USB flash drive. Insert a USB flash drive into a running computer.. Open a Command Prompt window as an administrator.. Type diskpart .. In the new command line window that opens, to determine the USB flash drive number or drive letter, at the command prompt, type list disk , and then click ENTER.. How do you force install Windows 10 using CMD?Need to install Windows 10 from Command Prompt.. list disk.. select disk 1.. clean.. create partition primary.. select partition 1.. active.. format fs=ntfs quick (or format fs=fat32 quick). assign letter=X.. |