Forgot that I had a big enough flash drive for the job

A while back I bought a 16GB flash drive. I mean, a good while back. But it was a very slow drive. Read speed was OK, but write speed was terrible. 4-5MBps on a good day. Doesn’t matter, I lost it a long time ago.

I do have my age old Transcend 1GB drive, which is very fast for a USB2.0 drive. But as you can see, you can do nothing with 1GB these days. Or, specifically ONE thing. Install Windows using the USB drive.

Right now, I do not have my DVDRW drive plugged in. I cannot plug it, even if I wanted to. The SATA cable is not long enough for to reach the SATA ports, going behind the motherboard. It’s a looooog way from the drive to the SATA port, thanks  to the 90 degree rotated orientation of the board with my Silverstone Raven RV03 case.

I was thinking of buying a USB3.0 flash drive, but tbh, I don’t really have much use for one. I mean, why would I need a flash drive? Few things come to my mind. Flash BIOS, run memtest, make UEFI screenshots…and that’s pretty much it. Dang, again I forgot the most important one. Install Windows!

But then again, I have not been lucky with installing Window using USB drive since my old P5B-E motherboard. The Gigabyte P55 board didn’t support it, my laptop doesn’t support it (mind you, it doesn’t even have an optical drive! how stupid!), so I didn’t expect ASRock to be on my side.

But how can I test this? I don’t have a big enough flash drive. Wait! I have a 8GB SD Card, which I use in the camera. And I also have an adaptor which the SD Card can be plugged to a USB port. (I had forgot all about this. ) The SD Card is pretty fast as well. Just like my 1GB drive. Getting write speeds almost 30MBps. So this should do the trick, right? Yes, it did. It worked without a hitch. So I guess I don’t need to buy a new flash drive.

P.S.

Now you don't need a flash drive or a DVD drive to install Windows 7 on your PC. If you already have Windows installed, all you have to do is make a recovery partition similar to what PC manufactuers do, and you can install Windows from that partition. Check out the article here.