Comments on: Installing and Booting Vista from a USB Flash Drive

By: Zak

Zak — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 04:15:14 +0000

NTFS is the best part of this method. A fully updated All-In-One Vista installer has a file that is over 4GB (files over 4GB will not copy to a FAT32 drive). With this method, you can have 11 fully updated vistas & a fully updated Office installer on a microSDHC card the size of a fingernail…if we can do this, WHERE ARE THE FLYING CARS?

By: William

William — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 06:01:50 +0000

Hit this link boys just installed windows xp home sp2 from colby mp3 player 1gig .It has all the programs you need and links to them Going to try vista which its supposed to do Tuesday will let you know .have to find my 5gig flash drive.LOL who would a thunk it. And no I did not have mp3s playing while it installed http://www.digwin.com/view/installing-windows-xp-from-usb-flash-drive

By: Ole

Ole — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:56:26 +0000

I only had some trouble getting Bootsect to fix the bootsector of a fat32 drive to be able to use bootmgr to boot with. It should be possible to get it working, but i didn’t.

The only flash drives i’ve had trouble with getting back to original state have been some really cheap drives that windows refused to find in diskpart and a drive that crashed during a format. with newer drives it shouldn’t be a problem.

a simple way of doing it should just be to reverse step 1 of the guide, redo step 2 and do step 3 with /fs:fat32 instead of /fs:ntfs.
Haven’t tried it though so i’m not a 100% sure.

If you only use the usb drive on windows computers it can actaully be smarter to have it in ntfs because of native disk compression and being able to save larger files.

By: freddyzdead

freddyzdead — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:06:15 +0000

Only thing I might comment on is that it isn’t necessary to format the flash drive to ntfs. Fat32 will work just fine. In fact, it isn’t a good idea to “ntfs” your flash drive at all, because you may not be able to get it back to original again.

By: Ole (the brother)

Ole (the brother) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:38:57 +0000

VoldEMorT;
I’ve seen that sometimes the USB drive won’t show up in diskpart. I don’t remember exactly why, but it might help trying a different USB drive. I think I saw the same thing the first couple of times I tried to make a USB HDD bootable, and I think I solved it by doing a complete reformat of the drive in partition commander or something like that.
I wouldn’t recommend trying that seeing as when trying to figure out how to do all this I actually spent 18 hours fiddleing with 2 USB drives and a USB HDD in 3 or 4 different partitioning programs. (would have been alot easier to just find my USB DVD drive, but where’s the fun in that)

I have seen that some USB drives are harder to find in diskpart. My expirience is that it’s usually easier to find the high end USB drives like Corsair.

If I remember correctly (was a while ago I did this) what I did was to go into some partitioning program and remove all the partitions on the USB drive and then add a new one that was active and format it to NTFS.

Some USB drives won’t show up in most partitioning programs, one of my first ones I lost all the data I had on it when I accidentaly managed to crash a format of the drive, it wouldn’t show up as a drive anymore. I had to go to the manufactorers website and download a program from them to be able to reformat it so that it was usable again.

Also to Andrew;
When I was figuring this out I couldn’t use the vista version of diskpart, that was actually my main problem since al the guides i found all required vista in the first place. So it should be completely possible to follow this guide without having to get into the vista version of diskpart.
But if you can use it, the vista version has a few more posibilities that could make the process a bit quicker

By: cinhau

cinhau — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:46 +0000

@VoldEMorT
may be after step open cmd and type diskpart, you can type list disk to see which is your usb drive.. if you have 2 HDD, then the usb drive must be disk 2..
hope this can solve your problem..

By: cinhau

cinhau — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:15 +0000

@VoldEMorT
may be after step open cmd and type diskpart, you can type disk list to see which is your usb drive.. if you have 2 HDD, then the usb drive must be disk 2..
hope this can solve your problem..

By: VoldEMorT

VoldEMorT — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 13:33:09 +0000

Hi I’m just new to these stuff and i was interested in this article but there is something that i don’t get .. every time i do list disk it just gets me the disk 0 which is m HDD .. can u help me with that please .

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:46:02 +0000

Nice article. Thanks.
Like your brother, I lacked an optical drive on the PC in qesiton and any other Vista machine.

With this article and a bit of fiddling myself I was able to make active the inactive bootable Vista partition on my HDD.

One clarification I would like to make to your article is that I had to boot a XP machine with the Vista installation disk, in order to get to a Vista command prompt and run diskpart in there. Apart from that, I did everything else as described above.

By: xcopy drive

xcopy drive — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:02:09 +0000

[...] …http://www.techspot.com/vb/all/windows/t-12086-Problems-with-XCOPY-over-networked-drive.htmlInstalling and Booting Vista from a USB Flash Drive My brother recently had to swap hard drives in his ThinkPad. Seeing as his fancy IBM doesn??t have [...]