Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool

OK, I hadn't read post #21 in this thread. Sorry for any confusion.
Also of note, if you're wanting to format to FAT32, the drive should be 32GB or less for Windows to cooperate.
Cheers.

Wrend said:

So in my case where the original Windows DVD was no longer compatible are you saying I could have just extracted the downloaded iso and copied the files over to a FAT32 formatted USB flash drive and booted to that instead of bothering with Rufus or the USB/DVD Download Tool?

If you have old ( pre SP1) media, it is sensible to d/l more recent media.

People that already have an installation dvd including SP1 can create bootable usb by formatting it to fat32 and copying the dvd contents to it.

Or if you have a downloaded iso , the contents of the iso can be extracted to fat32 formatted usb.

For the sake of curiosity, I set up the USB thumb drive again and formatted it to NTFS (it's a 64GB drive, so won't easily format to FAT32 in Windows), while otherwise using the diskpart steps as show in post #21 of this thread. Then I extracted the downloaded Windows install ISO to a folder and copied the contents over to the USB.

This worked and I was able to boot to the USB drive and Windows setup.

I had needed to use the newer downloaded version from Microsoft to fix a startup error. The original install DVD (which is actually SP1 and originally used to install Windows on the computer) was no longer compatible with repairing Windows startup for whatever reason, which I thought was rather strange. But as mentioned, fortunately the newly downloaded version worked to repair the installed Windows startup. To do this I had used Rufus, but could have just followed the steps mentioned here instead.

It took a bit of messing about to sort out, but was likely still faster than setting up and copying over a 1.42 TB backup to the system drive.

Have a good one.