can vista be installed from a hard drive?

[mythrandyr]

Hi guys,

I was wondering if windows vista could be installed from an SSD?

I have a usb pen drive or few handy and i've tried installing vista via the pen drive but the drive is so slow that it died on me during installation and i had to revert back to installing vista from CD.

Is their anyway, via boot device priority/diskpart in the bios or such like that i can copy the root directorys of the vista dvd to my hard drive and then install vista from hard disk drive like with the pen drive?

thanks,


Mythrandyr.

 

[Django x2]

So. From a working machine open command prompt and type the following:

Diskpart

select disk 1 (where disk 1 is your USB drive / external HD, etc)
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign

now, with your Vista DVD in the drive (and assume its D, open the run box and type

xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\ (where e: is the drive letter assigned to your flash drive).

This will extract the bootable folders and files to your usb drive, etc and then you can choose to boot from USB from the BIOS.

I do this with almost all my installs and its miles quicker than CD / DVD

You might be able to do this from the hard drive if its partitioned up correctly, but I'm not sure it would be that quick as you're reading / writing to the same disk during install.

 

[mythrandyr]

thanks lucero, i've tried that method on a USB stick and it does work fine but i can't get the HDD to opperate in the same way. I've downloaded a fat32 partitioning program called fat32format but no matter what i do i can't get the Windows Vista Install screen up. I think it is a bit strange that you can install vista from a flash drive but not directly from a standard sata drive.