This tutorial will help you in creating a bootable USB drive of Windows Vista which you can use to install Vista in any system. It might become very useful when you don't have access to DVD drive.
1. First format your USB drive in NTFS file system. You can do it by attaching your USB drive to your system and then format it from My Computer window.
2. Now open Command Prompt window from Start menu. Right-click on Command Prompt entry in start menu and select "Run as administrator" option.
3. Now type diskpart in Command Prompt window and press Enter. It'll launch DiskPart program:
4. Now provide following command:
list volume
It'll show a list of all drives in your system. Look for your USB drive entry. As in the below screenshot, the USB drive is "G" which you can determine from its "Type" entry.
Now you have to select the USB drive volume by providing select volume no. command. Since in our case volume no. of USB drive is "Volume 4", the command would be:
select volume 4
Now we have to make this drive active. So provide active command:
active
Now exit from DiskPart using exit command.
5. Now we need to create Boot sector on USB drive. We'll use "bootsect.exe" utility for this task. You can find this utility in Windows Vista setup disk. It'll be present in "Boot" directory.
Now provide following command in Command Prompt:
bootsect /nt60 G:
Here G is drive letter of USB drive. Replace it with the correct drive letter if your system has some other letter for USB drive.
6. At last, copy all files/folders from Vista Setup DVD to your USB drive and you have done.
Now you can boot using your USB drive and can install Windows Vista in any system.
PS: You can also take a look at some free tools to automatically create bootable USB drives to install Windows using following link:
Ultimate Collection of Best Freeware to Create Bootable USB Drive to Install Windows and Linux
This article was posted by VG in following section: Windows Vista.
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paul
hey i try to do a windows 2000 and i need some help please
mark
Hello and thanks for the tutorial! I have done everything you said but when i start computer with usb in, it does not detect and say press any key to start installation just loads up my previous version of vista. In the bios i have selected removable as the first boot device. Is this correct or does it have to say usb?
Any help would be much appreciated.
mark
It's ok have sorted it, just had to change harddrive boot order aswell and now it works. Thanks once again for this!
cornel
Thank you for this.
I made it work.
Altough I ran in two problems but I figured them :
1. the one where it says that there is no partition selected ; well, instead of volume use disk and then partition (list and select for each of them, first for disk then for partition).
2.the one mark ran into : in bios are two options: one for first boot device (and second, third also), thats fine let it be harddisk (or usb hdd), but there is another above, that is for hdd (only) order, there had to put the already recognized usb first.
(gigabyte board, award bios).
Hope will help others that run into problems.
lio
hey man, somebody knows how convert SD fat32 to SD NTFS please help.
nailcutter
error on active command
cameti2
Same Here, Error on active command.
BTW, very nice tutorial!
thanks.
nailcutter
more details on the active command pls
nailcutter
step 1 shows format usb drive in ntfs.
but it shows FAT32 before step 5. how vague can this be?
nailcutter
hmm still does not work on active command, maybe its the version of my diskpart, the image 6.0.6001 while my diskpart version is 5.1.3565
any thoughts?