Make A Bootable Vista Installer for USB Flash Disk

The idea behind booting from USB Drive is slightly faster than CD/DVD-ROM, not mention if you have scratch problem. Also if you like to tweak the default installer to meet your own personal taste, I think USB Drive is more convenient. Unlike the CD/DVD you can delete the data in it many times you like and also you don't have to experience burn data in 4x speed.

What You Will Need
Windows Vista - Some reason it only works on Windows Vista (at least what I tried)
Command Prompt - The real fun starts here
USB Flash Drive - To become your USB Install Flash Drive. The size depends on your final CD/DVD installer size. I'm using tinyVista SP1 so 1 GB Flash Disk is enough.

The Steps

Insert your USB Flash Drive into any computer with Windows Vista. Make sure that it installs it correctly and everything comes up fine. It would be good if your USB flash disk is an empty, clean and fresh one.
Load an elevated command prompt (Start menu-> all programs -> accessories -> right click on "Command Prompt" and click on "Run as Administrator"). Or you just can type in cmd at Run.. box and press Ctrl+Shift+Enter.
Type in diskpart and hit Enter.
Next type each the follow commands in respective order at the DISKPART> command prompts. Note - this assumes that disk 3 is the USB flash drive (as it was on my system). You will need to replace the “3” in “select disk 3” with the disk number of your USB flash drive.

Quote:list disk
select disk 3
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
assign
exit

This should all come out looking like this:



After this is done, just copy the contents of the CD/DVD to the flash drive, whether it is a clean or tweaked version.

Remove the Flash Drive, and boot from it. There are several ways to get your computer to boot from the USB Flash Drive now. My computer hitting F8 during the BIOS load screen allows me to choose what drive to boot from. I prefer this way because you should only ever need to boot from removable media once. The other way is to get into your bios and change the boot order so that the USB drive boots first. After it has reset once, you need to change it back unless you want it to install over and over again. I would go over how to do this but each bios is pretty much unique to the hardware.

It took about 40 minutes to install my tinyVista SP1.

ENJOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!