Jetway MiniTOP review JBC600C99-52W - Installing an operating system with an USB drive

Installing an operating system with an USB drive

So the product does not come with a DVD-rom installed, and neither can it be installed. That will limit your options for sure. You can do a few things, use an External USB DVD-ROM, you could clone a disk image onto the storage unit prior to installing it. Or install windows from a bootable USB flash drive.

For a lot of people installing an operating system from a USB stick seems complicated, therefore I wanted to include a little guide. All you need is an 4 GB USB memory stick and our guide ...

The method we explain is quite simple and you can use it without any problems. There is one condition though, your motherboard must support USB Boot feature to make use of the bootable USB drive. All modern motherboards can do this, and the mini-TOP as tested today does so as well.

Requirements:

• USB Flash Drive (Minimum 4GB)
• Windows 7 or Vista installation files.

Guide-  create bootable Windows 7/Vista USB drive

1. Plug-in your USB flash drive- The content on this disk will be deleted, so make sure you empty the flash-drive.
2. Open Command Prompt with admin rights. (Start menu > All programs > Accessories, right click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator).
3. Type in the following commands in the command prompt: DISKPART and hit enter
4. Next type LIST DISK command and note down the Disk number of your USB flash drive. In the below screenshot my Flash unit no is Disk 3.

1. Next type all the commands below one by one. Here I assume that your disk drive no is “Disk 3”. If you have Disk 2 as your USB flash drive then use Disk 2.
   
   So below are the commands you need to type and execute one by one:
   • SELECT DISK 3
   • CLEAN
   • CREATE PARTITION PRIMARY
   • SELECT PARTITION 1
   • ACTIVE
   • FORMAT FS=NTFS (Format process may take a couple of minutes)
   • ASSIGN
   • EXIT

Don’t close the command prompt just yet as we need to execute one more command.

• Now you can insert your Windows7/Vista DVD into the optical drive and check the drive letter of the DVD drive. For this article I will assume that your DVD drive letter is “D” and USB drive letter is “H” (open "my computer" to find out about it).
• Now we are back in the command prompt and type the following:
  D: CD BOOT and hit enter. Where “D” is your DVD drive letter.

• So change to drive D: and type CD BOOT and hit enter ( you enter the directory BOOT on the Windows Installation CD)(
  Now the essential part, we are going to update the USB drive with BOOTMGR compatible code. Type in the following:
  BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H:

Where we designate “H” that is your USB drive letter. Once you enter the above command you will see the below message.

• Copy your Windows 7/Vista DVD contents to the USB flash drive.
• Your USB drive is ready to boot and install Windows 7/Vista.

If your USB stick refused to be booted from, repeat the BOOTSECT.EXE /NT60 H: step.

Of course bare in mind you will need to change the boot priority in your motherboard BIOS to USB from the HDD or DVD ROM drive. You can now install Windows from this bootable USB drive. And as stated, obviously you could use an external USB driver just as fine as well.