Install Vista / XP from USB / Pen drive

If you ever installed Windows you might have observed that a fresh install of Vista DVD takes around 20 -30 minutes! Oh! I know that’s a lot of time, how about making it short? I know you want to. The trick is booting from a pen drive instead of a DVD rom. Using this trick you can complete the installation in less than 10 minutes! Ok so let me keep it short and start with the tutorial, just follow the below instructions carefully:

Stuff required:
Windows Vista DVD
4GB Pen Drive or more

Procedure:

STEP 1: Selecting a Pen Drive
The first step is to get a fast pen drive. The pen drive must have good read and write speeds. Well, nowadays most the pen drives have good speeds. A drive with 25MB/sec. & a write speed-14MB/sec should do the job with ease.

STEP 2: Formatting the Pen Drive
Once you have a good pen drive you need to format it. Here’s how you do it:
Launch command prompt, you can do so by typing CMD in search bar and hitting enter. Now in command prompt type the following:

DISKPART> list disk

A list of external storage devices will appear. Make a note of your pen drive disk name. Assuming your disk name is disk 1 the following commands are computed. Change ‘disk 1’ to the correct disk name if it’s different. Now type the following commands:

diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

Note: 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. So make sure you select the right drive

STEP 3: Copy Windows Vista DVD content to the Flash Drive
In this step you need to copy the contents of the Vista DVD into the pen drive. To do so simply type the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your flash drive.

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

STEP 4: Setting the Boot Device
Once you’re done with copying the files. Shutdown the computer but don’t remove your pen drive. Now start your pc, and go into BIOS by pressing the ‘Delete’ key. Set the booting device to the pen drive. Save and Exit. That’s it, you can now install Vista from your pen drive.

Comments