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Install Vista from external USB hard drive?

A

Antoneo

Diamond Member
Hey guys, I have a laptop without a DVD-ROM drive and was wondering if it were possible to install Vista x64 from an external USB 2.0 hard drive.

I'm not going to buy an external USB DVD-ROM drive because I'd use it once and never again. Besides, that's the easy way out, not to mention boring, and who wants to do that? 😛 I ordered Vista DVD discs from Microsoft but since they are taking more than two weeks to arrive, I am going to use their Marketplace image available online.

In case this helps, I have a Seagate Freeagent drive with all of my Acronis backups in a single NTFS partition. I do have computers on which either Vista x86 or XP is installed. I suspect that another partition will need to be created; can the built in XP/Vista diskpart.exe utility be used to repartition a hard drive?
 
I did it to install Home Server, which is the same setup process as Vista.

- placed copy of Vista DVD onto external USB drive
- made a PE 2.0 USB stick
- plugged in the external drive and the usb stick
- booted from it and then had to run the imagex.exe command line switches to apply the external drive image to the internal c drive

wasnt tooo bad
 
Great, it's good to know that it works. The process I had in mind was a little different than the one you described. I think I can figure the details out; I'll let you guys know how everything goes.
 
One question, how did you create a copy of the Vista DVD? I am guessing it is in *.wim format since you said you used imagex.exe with it later.
 
Update: Ok, I received my Windows Anytime Upgrade discs (one 32-bit and the other 64-bit) in the mail yesterday but as luck would have it, the 32-bit disc was warped and consequently could not be read. Nuts. Well, a simple xcopy of the DVD to my USB hard drive worked out great for the 64-bit install. Laptop booted from the USB correctly, and the installation process went fine. Very fast I might add.

Since it took several weeks for the discs to arrive, I have no intention of waiting around for the replacement 32-bit Vista disc (though I did request one). There are direct download links to the Vista install.wim image online from digitalriver, a Microsoft partner for their Marketplace. I'll have to figure out how to install Vista from that and will update this thread accordingly.
 
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