Boot install files from hard drive

Pretty sure this crops up a lot but I couldn't find any answers on google, and this seems a very useful place.

I wish to have a method to install windows 7 (Or any OS for that matter) from a hard drive that contains just the installation files. I am aware of creating system images, ghosting and that whole scene but it's such a long winded process compared to just burning the CD again (Original is in storage and no I don't want to go get it ).

Pretty certain this can be done with some kind of DOS program that is loaded from the drive: When it is selected as primary boot. However, I have no experience with programming DOS applications, or if this is even possible (Pretty sure it is given DOS boot rom's exist).

Thanks for any tips and info you can provide.

[Edit] Was thinking to use this method but unsure how a hard drive will react: http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-in...working-guide/

For a plain vanilla OS install, this method should work.

Recovery Partition - Create

But you'll need to install all drivers, apps customizations- thats something you dont need to do if you restore from an image. And no, creating an image and restoring from it is very simple. See this macrium tutorial.

Imaging with free Macrium

Excellent stuff.

I often create backups of my entire user profile (Excluding large files) and this restore most all of my application preferences that are stored in the user account folder. Most of the other applications I run that need files backing up have all of the files initially saved to a separate drive than the OS is residing on making recovery that much easier.

Thanks bud. Do you know how to cancel a DISKPART format?

Why do you want to cancel? Dont think it will, if you press cntrl + C you should get an error message.

If this is a quick format, data can be recovered with recuva or something similar.

Was going to use the USB boot drive method, which uses a Long-Format: Suffice to say waiting 3 hours for a 500GB drive to finish wasn't worth it.

Thanks anyway bill the method you posted worked perfectly, total install time for windows 7 is now 8 minutes (Time taken to reach the desktop)