Installing Windows 7 from a USB stick

I needed to install Windows 7 on an old laptop that struggled with booting from a DVD.

I found a nice tool to do this automatically: WUDT. It has a longer name, but I like the abbreviation better. :)

It formatted the USB drive so I used a fresh one for the purpose. It might be possible to disable the formatting in some cases with a registry setting.

Booting worked fine. I haven’t tested the actual installation yet as I want to preserve the hard drive until I’m sure all data has been recovered.