You
wish to create a single USB boot key/drive that will install any version of
Vista, Windows 7 or Server 2008 to a system's hard disk - i.e. just as if you
had all the Micro$oft Windows install DVDs in your pocket. This tutorial
has been written so that you can adapt it to install as few or as many as you
wish (or have room for on your USB drive!).

Note:
You can also install Windows XP as well as the other OS's. To install from
a Setup CD (just like booting from an XP install CD) see Tutorial #30 here.
To install XP from an image file, you first need to boot to WinPE v3 (2nd menu
option below) and also have a copy of the XP CD files on your USB drive (or a
ZIP file containing all the files) - see here for
details.

This
tutorial will allow you to boot from a USB flash drive (or USB hard disk) and
choose from a menu:

Fig. 1 This menu was made using menu2.lst (renamed
to menu.lst).

Equipment
required

• Source Microsoft DVDs or ISOs for
  Vista/Win7/Server 2008 (note OEM DVDs will usually not work) (Win7 ISOs here -
  use Digital River links, some other links may be broken)
• A USB drive large enough to fit all
  source files onto (min 4GB for one DVD, 32GB+ for all DVDs)
• RMPrepUSB  v2.1.617 or later
• Windows
  7 WAIK (click to download)
• A Windows Vista/Windows 7 computer
  to prepare the USB drive files (Win7/Vista required as BCDEdit.exe is
  required)
• The MultiWin9.Zip file (click the link and go to the Tutorials download section)

Method

Outline

1.    
Download and install the Windows 7 WAIK to
obtain ImageX utility and WinPE OS (you MUST use Windows 7 RTM WAIK version or
the menu.lst patches to bootmgr will not work)

2.    
Make a new folder called C:\MYUSB

3.    
Copy bootmgr (or make multiple copies of
bootmgr)

4.    
Copy the BCD files from each DVD
and modify them

5.    
Copy the boot.wim file from each DVD (a .WIM
file is like a .ZIP file)

6.    
Modify each boot.wim file

7.    
Copy over the Windows source file(s) from each
DVD (usually sources\install.wim)

8.    
Partition, format and create the USB drive
using RMPrepUSB

9.    
Boot from the target system using your new USB
install drive