Installing Windows 7 from a USB Hard Drive.

Posted by Mark Tomlin on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Mark Tomlin
Published on 2011-06-21T01:25:19Z Indexed on 2011/06/21 8:24 UTC
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Filed under:

Windows

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hard-drive

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usb

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installation

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gparted

I have a Western Digital Passport External Hard Drive (320GB) that I want to partition to keep the data on, but use some of the free space to install Windows 7 onto my desktop computer. Microsoft has given me the Windows 7 Enterprise Edition ISO to download. I would like to take the External HD and partition it so I can fit the ISO image onto it. How would I go about doing this?

Trying to use GParted to partition the external hard drive has caused a chicken or the egg problem. GParted can't see the drive unless it's mounted, and when it is mounted it will not allow me to do anything to the partition. When it's not mounted, GParted can't see the drive at all and as such can't do anything to the drive.

Once the drive is correctly partition, how do I go about moving the ISO image Microsoft gave me to my USB External Hard Drive? Are there any special steps that I need to take?

I am using Ubuntu 11.04 & GParted 0.7.0, on my Chromebook to do this. Any support would be appreciated.

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