When I got myself the Sony VAIO TZ90 with 32 GB of SSD I decided not to have a CD drive installed but to rather opt for an additional 160 GB HDD for all those data files that bundle up when you are developer. Unfortunately that meant I have to find workarounds when installing the OS from scratch and one of them was to install Vista from a USB Flash Disk which is also a lot faster than a CD would ever be.
After finding lots of conflicting information on how to really go about installing from USB here is the sweet and short of how its done:
1. Download and install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (mouthful) and use it to format the USB Flash Disk using Fat32.
2. Insert your Vista CD into another Computer with CD ROM installed or use a Tool like Daemon Tools to attach the Vista ISO. Now do the following:
- remember which drive your USB Stick is (for this example F:)
- remember which drive your Vista CD is (for this example E:)
- open a CMD window
- change directory to the "boot" folder on your Vista CD
- type bootsect /nt60 F: which will format the bootsector to be bootable for Vista
- change directory to the root of your Vista CD
- type xcopy E:\*.* /s/e/f/r/h/x F: which will copy the contents of your CD to your USB drive
- close the CMD window
- start the computer on which you want to install Vista
- ensure the BIOS is set to boot from USB
- boot and enjoy a blazing fast Vista installation
3 comments:
Is this possible with an oem version of vista?
Thank you very much. After 5 hours of searching and coming up empty, your post helped me get the job done immediately. Bless you.
David in Cleveland
Tried this on my son's Toshiba Satellite. PC recognised usb drive, and brought me to boot menu. When I clicked on Toshiba Recovery Wizard for full reinstall, it asked me for CD and popped out internal CDROM (which is not working). Same problem when try to install from an external cdrom via usb. Any ideas as this is driving me nuts...
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