Installing and Booting Vista from a USB Flash Drive

My brother recently had to swap hard drives in his ThinkPad. Seeing as his fancy IBM doesn’t have a disc drive, he needed to figure out a different way of installing Vista on the machine after the swap. Now like most of us he had seen the many articles stating you can install Vista from a USB drive so he decided to give it a go. To start off with he found the instructions on Kurt Shintaku’s blog but it turned out they were not entirely applicable.

What the many people who cite this method don’t say is that you have to have a computer with Vista already installed to follow the procedure. Why? Because diskpart works differently in Vista and XP. For one thing you can’t use diskpart to format disks in XP.