install new Win 7 from a thumb drive

I need to build a new computer and have most of the parts. It turns out my motherboard does not have any IDE connections and must use SATA devices. My CD/DVD is an IDE so I can't use it. I ordered a SATA burner and SSD but because of back ordering it won't get here for several days yet. I'd like to get Win 7 installed on one of my SATA drives to get the ball rolling before the CD/DVD drive arrives. I have just about everything I'm going to load on the computer in two USB drives so I don't need the DVD drive except to load Windows.

My thought was to make a USB thumb drive bootable in dos and then have the contents of Win 7 moved to that same drive and I could boot from there. I did so and trying to run setup and the files can not be run under DOS. I then made the thumb drive NTFS and transferred the win 7 files to that but when it goes to boot I get the message NTLDR is missing and I have no access to the files on the thumb drive anyway.

I was hoping to use imgburn to make an iso of the win 7 install disc and then be able to "burn"/transfer that data including the auto boot to the thumb drive but imgburn only will burn to a disc, not a discrete drive.

Anyone have an idea I can try to get windows 7 onto a thumb drive so it will allow Win 7 to be installed from it?

Thanks.

 

Thanks hbhb,

I made an iso image from the installation DVD using imgburn but when I used the above tool with it, it said the image was not a valid iso file. Imgburn makes excellent ISOs, maybe it's the name imgburn gave the iso that the tool is not happy with? either way, it's not flying.

Any other ideas?

 

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