How to install vista from the external usb HDD

I though I'll just post my experiences with installing vista on my aa1. I don't have any usb flash drive or usb dvdrom so had to figure out how to install new system from usb hard drive (freecom toughdrive).

Problem was that I already had 80gb of stuff on it and didn't really want to loose it all.
So there is a good guide here: http://jblarg.blogspot.com/2008/08/inst ... ndows.html which I'll just quote here and add my comments

So obviously this step we want to avoid as we have data on the drive. Problem with usb drives is that you cannot really resize partition in windows as Partition Magic refuses to do so. So my workaround was to boot using Partition Magic boot cd (version 8.05) which I had handy and suprisingly it detected usb disk fine. So to avoid longish moving data on the disk I just knocked off 8gig of the end of the partition (past the 1024 cylinder) and created a fat32 partition there. Don't worry about messages that it will not be bootable, it will. Make this partition active as well.

at this stage may I just add that Partition Magic made some errors in the partition table and some sectors were overlapping. Don't panic at this stage because no data is lost.

anyway, we boot to windows now and process next step from the quoted guide:

All fine, installation went fine and everything. It's worth mentioning that making fat32 partition active made my first ntfs partition hidden and windows couldn't see it anymore. Additionally I had error in partition table and Partition Magic refused to work on it. This is where TestDisk (http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk) came in. It fixed the partition table from the windows level and unhidden the ntfs partition. Only thing left was to hide fat32 partition and leave it for future use (8gb out of 250gb in my case). If I ever need to reinstall windows I'll have everything already in place.

Now I'm enjoying Vista on my acer and I must say Aero works great, whole system is very very quick and don't need to mention that is much more usable than Linpus linux of course. So if your student get a copy from MSAA like I did and enjoy!

Let me know if you have any questions.

 

sweet, thanks for the tut. seems soo easy, hope I have timeto do it today!

 

Is it posible to achive the same results using a usb dvd drive and a vista install disk

 

Look here:
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