I had to follow these steps to boot and install server 2008 on my server box (which doesn’t have a DVD-drive).. I was quite shocked to find that server 2008 R2 no longer natively supports 32-bit processors, so this may become quite useful for those of you that aren’t blessed with the wallet for a shiny 64bit server for your home.

Open command prompt and use the following commands: 

  1. Type: diskpart
  2. list disk
  3. select disk 1    (assuming disk 1 was your thumb drive in the above list disk command)
  4. clean
  5. create partition primary
  6. select partition 1
  7. active
  8. format fs=fat32
  9. assign
  10. exit

Finally you will need to copy over the server 2008 files from the cd or the place where you extracted your ISO.

  1. xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (d:\ can be replaced by your cd/dvd drive letter and e:\ is the drive letter of your usb drive)

 

Considerations

If you have a U3 drive you may want to remove the U3 partition before you begin.