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So you’ve got a netbook that came with Windows XP, and you want to put Windows 7 on it, but it doesn’t have an optical drive. You could buy Asus’ External DVD Drive, which is pretty slick, but if you only need to install Windows, there’s a way to do it without dropping the money on an optical drive. Pick up any 4GB or larger USB thumb drive, if by some chance you don’t already have one. I  used an 8GB A-Data Drive I had lying around. Get your copy of Windows 7. If you downloaded it, you’ll need to find where the ISO was saved on your computer. If you’re using a disc, put it in the disc drive on your other Windows based computer, but don’t run it, obviously.

Stick the USB drive into your windows based computer, and disconnect any other external drives, just to be on the safe side. You need to make your thumbdrive bootable and format it. Luckily you can do this with a program built into Windows.

Click start, and select “Run”. A box will pop up asking you what you want to run. Type “cmd”. This will open a command prompt.

Type “diskpart” (without quotation marks) and it will open the command line program DiskPart. You’ll use this to prepare your thumbdrive.

First, type “list disk” and press enter. This will bring up a list of the volumes connected to your computer. You need to determine which is your thumb drive. It should be pretty easy based on the disk size. In my case, I have two 100gb HDD’s, a 2GB SD card for a camera, and the 8GB thumb drive. The thumb drive is disk 3. Use whichever disk your thumbdrive is, and type “Select Disk X”, with X being the number of your drive. This is vitally important. We’re about to format the volume, which will erase everything on it. If you select the wrong disk, you’ll lose all the data on the disk you select. Be EXTRA sure you pick the volume number that corresponds to your thumb drive, and if you fuck up, don’t come bitching to me.

Ok, now we’ve selected the thumb drive. Type “clean” and then hit enter. This will clean the volume.

Now type “create partition primary” and hit enter. This creates a primary partition on your thumb drive.

Now “active” and press enter. This marks the newly created partition as active, so that you can boot from it.

Finally “format fs=fat32″ and press enter. This will format your thumbdrive using the FAT32 file system. It will probably take a few minutes, depending on the size of your drive. Here’s a screenshot of the whole process, so you can compare.

Now you can close diskpart. The next thing you need to do is extract your windows file to the thumb drive.

You’re gonna need a program to extract the files, and the best one I know of is 7zip. 7zip is free, open source, and multiplatform. Download and install it from 7-zip.org. It installs like any other program, so I’ll let you handle that.

Once you have 7zip installed, Hit “Start” and “My Computer” or “Computer” depending on your version of windows. Navigate to where the Windows 7 ISO is located. If it’s on a disc, it will be in your disk drive. If you downloaded it, it will be where ever you saved it.

Right click on it, and you’ll see a new menu option, “7zip”. Hover over it, and another menu will pop up. Click on “Extract Files”

Once you do, you’ll get a popup menu with options to extra the data from your disc image file (ISO). Click on the ellipses (…), and click “Computer”. Navigate down to your thumb drive, and select it as the location to put the extracted files. Should look like this, except with the drive letter of your thumb drive, if it’s different from mine.

This might take a few minutes, depending on the speed of your computer and the speed of your USB drive. You should end up with a USB drive that looks like this.

Now “Safely Remove Hardware” and remove your USB drive. You’re ready to install.

Shut down your netbook and stick the USB drive in it. Boot it up, and go into boot options. On an EeePC, you just tap ESC while it’s booting up and you’ll get a menu. On others, you might need to go into BIOS and change the boot order to make USB first. Select the USB drive from boot menu, and hit enter.

It should start loading windows setup as normal, and from there it’s all the same as installing from a disc.

Enjoy your new windows installation!

Buy Windows 7