Install Windows 7 on a USB stick or hard drive with WinToUSB

How would you like to run Windows 7 from a USB stick? Thanks to a small tool that we can count on right now, this task will be one of the favorites of many, since the possibility of carrying a USB pendrive in our pocket is one of the most peculiar situations of the moment. With the help of WinToUSB we will have the possibility to do it without much effort and with very few steps.

Previously we must mention that despite having used Windows 7 and a USB pendrive as an example, the application WinToUSB can actually be used in a myriad of environments; It is not only this operating system that we could manage, but also Windows XP, Windows 8, its most recent update and of course, external hard drives that connect to the computer through a USB cable. If you want to know a few tricks when it comes to having a Windows operating system in a storage unit like the one suggested, then you should continue reading the rest of this article.

What exactly does WinToUSB do?

Perhaps there is a bit of confusion for many people with what we have suggested from the beginning, that is, the possibility of run to a specific Windows operating system from an external storage drive, which may well be a USB pendrive or a hard drive indistinctly. What we will mention in this article has nothing to do with the possibility of transfer the installation files from an ISO image to a USB flash drive as we had previously suggested with a tool provided by Microsoft, but rather, that once we insert our USB device (pendrive or external hard drive) to the computer, when it is turned on (it starts) it will recognize the accessory to initialize from there .

• The first thing you have to do is download WinToUSB from its official site, having to be careful in try to acquire the stable version and not to the beta, because the latter could have a few compatibility errors with different Windows operating systems.
• The other situation to take into account is that WinToUSB is not a portable application but rather, you will have to install it in your current operating system; If, anyway, you want to make this tool portable, we suggest you do it through the procedure indicated in a previous article.

Well, after having installed WinToUSB on our Windows computer, we will only need a few additional elements to start with this task:

1. An external hard drive or a USB pendrive.
2. The ISO image of our Windows operating system.

This last aspect is very important, since the application is only compatible with this disk image format; if you have a DVD disc with Windows, at the same you can convert to ISO image with specialized application, which you will host in a location on your local hard drive, although the application offers you the opportunity to choose a CD-ROM disk with the operating system.

The image that we have placed previously corresponds to the WinToUSB interface in its first execution phase, which means that here we will define if we want to use an ISO image or a DVD disc with the Windows installer. As an example we have chosen an ISO image where Windows 8.1 is located, same that we have legally downloaded from the Microsoft site; WinToUSB has detected the presence of 2 versions of this operating system, that is, the standard and the professional. We must choose the one that we want to be present on our USB pendrive.

On the next screen, the application will recognize the different USB devices that are connected to the computer; A warning window will appear, which will indicate that the device will be formatted. If we have already made a backup of the content of the same, then we could proceed by continuing by clicking on Yes.

The process can take a little time, something that will be worth it after it is finished; When we restart our computer with the USB pendrive inserted, the different devices and accessories will begin to be configured as well as the equipment's drivers. By this we mean that this USB pendrive will be personalized to our computer and more not, to different ones. The developer has mentioned that it is preferable to perform this task on an external hard drive, since the USB stick does not have a considerably fast speed to execute certain Windows instructions.