The world of Marc O'Polo – Blog

This will walk through the steps to create a bootable USB flash drive for the purpose of installing a Vista or Windows 7 OS.  These instructions assume that you have a computer with Windows Vista installed on it.

Required:

• USB Flash Drive (4GB+)
• Microsoft OS Disk (Vista / Windows 7)
• A computer running Vista / Windows 7

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Yesterday I received the following error on my Windows 7 x64 Enterprise laptop when I tried to logon.

The User Profile Service Failed the logon. User profile cannot be loaded.

Then the logoff message appeared en I was back where I was started.

The strange thing is nothing had changed when I shutdown the laptop last night. No update’s installed, no software installed. So I started searching the internet. The following article resolved my problem. It is an article about Windows Vista, you can read it here. Link.

 The first thing I tried was the system restore to an earlier restore point. That worked for me..

One of the great things about the Vista and post-Vista operating systems is that the installer subsystem allows you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to installing multiple operating systems. It is fairly easy to put together a single installation DVD or USB stick that will allow you to install Vista, Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2 – in a variety of x86 and x64 flavors.

A couple of things to note about this guide:

• I do not use Vista — I have never really used Vista and now with Windows 7 out there really is no reason to; however the steps here will work just fine with Vista installation sources
• I have only tested this using a USB stick and will only cover that method here – it’s much more flexible (and faster) for installation than using DVD — but DVDs should work just fine: you can find plenty of tutorials on the web that will tell you how to use oscdimg.exe to take the files we create here and turn them into a burnable ISO

 WHAT YOU WILL NEED:

• USB stick, at least 4 GB (perhaps larger depending on how many OSes you plan to integrate, I use a 16 GB) that has been properly formatted using Steps 1 and 2 here
• ISOs or DVDs of the operating systems that you plan to integrate
• imagex.exe (can be found for download on the web, or you can download the full 1.7 GB WAIK here)
• computer running Vista or newer operating system (XP should work but I have not tested it)

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