Installing Windows Xp/Vista/seven From USB

So Windows 7 beta is out the door and you are ready to begin your beta experience.  Over the next few months there will be additional builds for Windows 7 (x86 and x64) as well as Windows Server 2008 R2 and that leads to a lot of installs and a lot of DVD burning and useless DVDs as soon as a new build is out.  So why not install from USB or whatever other removable media your computer can boot from?  Insert your removable media into a Windows XP or Vista PC and run the following commands from an elevated command prompt.

1. diskpart
2. list disk (find the disk number for the removable media)
3. select disk #
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. select partition 1
7. active
8. format fs=fat32 quick
9. assign letter=y (or any free drive letter)
10. exit

Once that is complete mount the ISO and run the following command.
xcopy x:\*.* /s/e/f y:\
Where “x” is the drive letter of the mounted ISO.  Once complete boot off the device and install the OS.  When a new Windows 7 or 2008 R2 build is released, simply delete the contents, rerun the xcopy command and you are ready to go again.  As a note this also works for Windows Vista and Server 2008 but you already figured that out
You can grab the Windows 7 and Server 2008 beta (as of January 9th, 2009) at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/ and there are plenty more Windows 7 resources coming to the TechNet Springboard site as well!