Setup Windows Vista using USB Flash drive
How to boot Vista with USB drive? Yes it is possible to boot with USB drive. Today, we see major technological changes in the field
of Computer Science. It was some decade ago, computers
were thought to be a machine, which is intended to be
used for simple mathematical calculations. After a decade,
one has realized the actual potential power of computer,
as computers today have been implemented even for medical
sciences. The timely development of many faster, high
reliable devices has made this possible.
Slow floppy replaced by faster USB media
In today’s world of fast developments, we expect
the computer to be faster than anybody else. Everybody
today expects the computer to work faster from startup
to shutdown. The software developer expects the programs
to run faster. Similarly, what is wrong, when a system
administrator or a hardware engineer expects the setup
to copy files at a faster rate. The answer seems nothing
wrong.
Those who installed programs during early 1990’s,
know the pain behind installing programs and operating
systems. The installation medium was much slower with
floppies. One had to spend hours together to install
large programs and was needed to be present throughout
the installation process to change floppies at regular
intervals, after the contents of inserted floppies gets
copied into the hard disk. As the number of disks increased,
this process started to become extremely tedious.
CD ROM popular installation media
By 1995, CD-ROM drives started flowing into the market
and companies started giving installation files in the
CD’s. The CD’s got high capacity of 640
to 700 M.B. compared to 1.4 Mb. of floppy disks. The
CD ROM soon became the popular installation media as
one could give the entire software bundled in CD ROM
along with setup files. This eliminated the need for
changing floppies at the regular intervals. With CD-ROM’s,
the process of installing files became faster when compared
to floppies.
DVD’s started to occupy the place of CD’s
The programs started to become larger in sizes, and
a single CD-ROM started to become not enough for the
large programs. So, programmers started delivering the
programs in multiple CD’s. Today, DVD’s
started to occupy the place of CD’s. The ability
to store 4 to 5 GB of data in a DVD made programmers
to deliver large programs in DVD’s instead of
multiple CD’s. Windows Vista is being delivered
in DVD’s instead of CD’s.
choosing USB’s for installation of Windows
Vista in the high speed computer
But, by looking at the title of this article, one
may ask what makes one to look for USB, when there are
much better, faster DVD’s are being made available.
Better performance is the main criteria behind choosing
USB’s for installation of Windows Vista in the
high speed computer. It takes 20 to 25 minutes to install
Windows Vista from DVD’s. But, it takes only less
than 5 to 10 minutes to install using USB. The slowest
part of installation is waiting for one to provide correct
information such as target drive, entering the Product
key, etc. With Windows Vista, even that can be made
faster using the Windows Automated Installation Kit.
USB installation process
The USB installation process can be done in 4 steps.
- Plug in the USB drive.
- Prepare the USB drive by formatting the same
- Copy the Windows Vista DVD’s contents into
USB drive.
- Begin the actual process of installation by rebooting
the computer.
Plug in the USB drive of 4 GB capacity into the USB
port. While purchasing, make sure that the drive is
of Ultra-fast USB 2.0 flash drive of 4 GB and more in
capacity. The drive gets detected in the system and
required drivers will be installed. The drive will gets
identified by a drive letter in the drive list. Make
sure that, the drive letter is assigned properly to
USB drive before proceeding to the next step.
The next step in the given above procedure is to format
the USB drive. This prepares the USB drive for copying
setup files into it. In this cautious step, there are
chances of getting hard disk formatted! Formatting any
drive will cause data loss. So, at this stage, one needs
to be extremely cautious.
After making sure that drive letter points to USB drive,
format the drive using disk part, at the command prompt.
Run these set of commands,
- diskpart,
- select disk 1
- clean
- create partition primary 1
- select partition 1
- active
- format fs=fat32
- assign
- exit
After running the set of commands, simply copy the
Vista DVD contents into the flash drive. By using xcopy.
Xcopy d:\\*.* /s/e/f e:\\
Where “D:\\” points to the root of the
DVD drive and “E:\\” points to the root
of the flash drive. “/s/f/e” is given to
copy all files including all files in the subdirectories.
reboot the computer to begin installation
Next step, in the process is to reboot the computer
to begin installation. For rebooting one must have option
to boot the computer through USB in the BIOS. If the
computer configuration is latest one, you will get that
option. Make sure that, it is enabled and saved in BIOS
settings. The setup starts automatically in the same
way as in DVD installation, immediately after the reboot.
End a long hour wait
The flash drive installation began a new era in the
process of installation. It is certain to end a long
hour wait before the operation of installation gets
completes. This enables system administrators, service
engineers to get the system ready within few minutes. |
