Did you know you can install Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system from a USB flash drive? In case you didn’t know this type of installation was possible, well today you will learn how to install Windows Vista from a USB flash drive.

In order to successfully complete this you will need to do the following:

• Make sure you backup ALL Data stored on your USB Flash drive before beginning this guide.
• Make sure your Motherboard supports booting to a USB Flash Drive.
• Windows Vista Install DVD
• At least a 4gb USB flash drive (the faster read / write speed is the better)

Install Windows Vista Using USB Flash Drive

1. Click on the Windows Start button   and type “cmd” (without quotes) into the search box in the start menu and hit ENTER.

2. Now with the command prompt window open do the following:

IMPORTANT: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 4″.  you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type “list disk”) before cleaning it.  If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multiple hard drives, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command.

First type “diskpart” (Without quotes), after you type diskpart and hit enter your command prompt window should look similar to the one below.

Now that we have entered Diskpart we will need to identify your USB flash drives Disk number to do this we will do the following:

Do this by typing List Disk and hitting enter, this will display a list of hard drives currently connected to your system with there disk number (i.e. Disk 4). The CMD Window should now look the following:

CAUTION: Be extremely careful when performing the disk partitioning, If you end up formatting the wrong drive you WILL lose all of the information stored on that drive.

Now that we have identified your flash drive (Mine is Disk 4 which is 16GB) we will have format and partition your USB Flash Drive. To do this we will need to enter the following commands in the order listed.

1. Select disk 4 (or the number of the USB flash drive)
2. Clean
3. Create partition primary
4. Select partition 1
5. Active
6. Format fs=fat32
7. Assign
8. Exit
   

Copying Windows Vista DVD Contents To USB Flash Drive:

1. Click on the Windows Start button   and type “cmd” (without quotes) into the search box in the start menu and hit ENTER.

2. Now with the command prompt window open do the following:

(e:\ represents the drive letter of your flash drive, while d:\ represents the drive letter of your DVD-rom or DVD-RW drive letter, be sure to change those letters accordingly).

• xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

Finally, Make sure you set the primary boot device to your USB Flash Drive the next time you want to install Windows Vista!

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