Installing windows from a USB drive

For installing windows from a USB drive, all you would need is a computer running the windows vista operating system, the windows vista installation DVD and at least 4GB USB flash drive. Follow the simple steps ahead to make your own windows bootable USB drive. Step 1: Start windows vista, insert the pen drive into the computers USB port. Start command prompt,type diskpart and press [enter].

Step 2: Type list disk and press [enter]. Carefully note the USB drives disk number listed here. Generally it would be disk 1. Step 3: Type select disk 1 and press [enter] to choose the disk 1 as the drive to be worked on. Step 4: Type clean and press [enter]. This command clears out all the information of the volumes,partitions, boot sectors and the MBR from the USB flash drive. Step 5: Type create partition primary and press [enter]. This command will create a primary partition on the USB flash drive.

Step 6: Type select partition 1 and press [enter]. This command instructs the diskpart utility to select the newly created partition. Step 7: Type active and press [enter]. This command will make the current partition (primary) active to enable the USB flash drive to boot from. Step 8: Type format fs=fat32 and press [enter]. This command formats the selected drive partition using the FAT32 file system. Step 9: Type assign and press [enter]. This command assign a drive letter to the newly formatted partition. As there is no drive letter specified in the command line, the next available drive letter is assigned to the drive. Step 10: Exit from the diskpart utility using the exit command. Now insert the windows vista DVD in the optical drive and type the command xcopy e:\*.* /s /e /f F:\ and press [enter]. Here e:\ is the source drive letter and f:\ is the destition USB drive letter. This command will dump all the contents of the windows vista DVD on the the USB flash drive. Your USB drive is now ready to install window vista on any computer. Just set the boot sequence in the BIOS of the system to boot from the USB, insert the USB flash drive into the computers USB port and turn on the computer. Follow the regular installation for windows vista . NOTE: installing windows XP or Windows Vista from a USB flash drive is much faster as compared to installing from a CD/DVD. A high speed flash drive would make a difference.