I’ve been thinking about writing a post about “How to install Windows Vista from a USB Flash Drive” for a while but just never got around to doing it. It seems to me like there’s be a lot of folks who would want to install Windows Vista entirely from a USB Flash drive as well.

THEN THE QUESTION WOULD ARISE AS TO WHY INSTALL FROM USB FLASH DRIVE? Why would someone want to install a client OS from a thumb drive instead of a DVDROM or over the network? One reason: Performance. Installing Windows Vista from a high speed USB flash drive is in my experience the easiest & fastest way to complete a Windows Vista install. This is much faster than using a DVD, gigabit ethernet, or possibly even some external USB 2.0 hard drives, due to differences in access speed & transfer rate. To put this into perspective, y’know how installing Windows on a Virtual PC virtual machine from an .ISO CD image is really, really, really fast? Imagine something roughly just as fast, except for doing installations of the OS on to actual workstations. STEP-BY-STEP INSTRUCTIONS Here’s some step-by-step instructions on how we do this:-. Run CMD.EXE and type the following. Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as “disk 1″. 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 Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command. 1. diskpart 2. select disk 1 3. clean 4. create partition primary 5. select partition 1 6. active 7. format fs=fat32 8. assign 9. exit Copy Windows Vista’s DVD ROM content to the Flash Drive Simply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive. * xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ And that’s it. Boot up the machine, have it boot off the USB drive, and watch how fast the installation completes. If you thought Windows Vista installed quickly before then let’s see how you like it now. The slowest part of the install will probably be the computer waiting for you to type in information in the setup fields, and even that can be automated using the Windows Automated Installation Kit.