Friday, December 23, 2011

Building the one Install OS Flash Drive to rule them all...? (Windows 7 x86 & x64 and Live CDs and Rescue disks and...)

nhinkle - Making the Ultimate All-In-One Installation Flash Drive

"Super Users often find ourselves installing operating systems. Whether you run your own computer shop, manage an army of thousands of corporate workstations, or are just the tech-savvy friend everyone you know calls for help, you’ve probably had to install various flavors of Windows over and over again. Most of us have also spent a fair amount of time installing different Linux distros, running data recovery disks, and using various live CDs.

The problem that presents itself is managing all of the required disks. There are at least 6 common flavors of Windows 7 alone (Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate for both x86 and x64, plus Enterprise for you corporate types). Add in various distros of Linux and you start to see why some computer techs carry around whole folders of CDs.

I’ve been aware of Pendrive Linux for a while, which lets you setup a flash drive with multiboot Linux software, and can add a single Windows installation. But what if you wanted to have a single flash drive with all versions of Windows 7, as well as all the standard Linux boot disks? It took some work, but I decided to do this and the final result is impressive.

image..."

I dug the broad scope of this, that it included x86 & x64, the rescue disks and the Linux stuff. Now all I need is a big flash drive (oh and to get Win8 on this too... lol)

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