How to Make the Student Discounted Windows 7 Upgrade Bootable

If you took advantage of the $30 student discount on Windows 7 upgrades through Digital River you may have run into a roadblock when you tried to install the upgrade; especially if you wanted to do a clean install of Windows 7.

To do a clean install you need to boot from a disc or flashdrive instead of starting the install process from inside your current version of Windows. Another reason you may need a bootable version is if you had the Windows 7 release candidate installed on your computer beforehand.

Thankfully there are 2 simple solutions to making your Digital River Windows 7 upgrade bootable.

  1. You can create a bootable DVD
  2. You can make a 4 GB or larger USB drive Bootable.

How to turn your Windows 7 EXE file into a bootable disc or drive:

The first step is to click on setup and let it extract the files to the expanded setup” folder. Even though this folder has a boot and autorun file simply putting it on a flash drive or burning it to a CD won’t work so you’ll need to do the following.

Turn your Digital River Windows 7 upgrade into a bootable DVD:

  1. Download oscdimg from SevenForums and extract it to C:WindowsSystem32
  2. Open an elevated command prompt by typing cmd.exe in your Vista Search box. When it shows up right click and select run as administrator.
  3. Paste the following into the command prompt, be sure to put your username in:
    Oscdimg.exe u2 bC:Usersyour_usernameDesktopexpandedSetupbootetfsboot.com h C:Usersyour_usernameDesktopexpandedSetup C:7.iso
  4. Press enter and wait for your ISO to be made.
  5. Burn to a DVD with a burning program and you are ready to go.

These directions are expanded upon the original guide posted on SevenForums.com to be friendlier to novice users.

Turn your Digital River Windows 7 Upgrade into a bootable Flash Drive:

  1. Get anything important off of your 4 GB or larger flashdrive
  2. Download WintoFlash from Softpedia and unzip it.
  3. Run WintoFlash
  4. Click on Taskwintoflash1
  5. Choose, Transfer Windows Vista/2008/7 setup to Flash” and click Createwintoflash2
  6. Select your expandedSetup” folder for the Vista setup files path
  7. Choose your Thumbdrive location.
  8. Click Create and wait for it to create your bootable Windows 7 upgrade USB drive.

From there you just need to Install Windows 7 like normal.

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