Mark's Blog A developers point of view

Bootable Vista Install on a hard drive

For a long time I was wondering if it wouldn't be nice if you could boot your Vista Bootable CD from a hard drive. Because hard disks are much faster in comparison to a DVD I figureed having the bootable DVD on a hard drive would shave off a few minutes of your installation time. Unfortunately I could not find any information on how to make this possible. Google just came back with results regarding Dual Boot setup's or having a full Vista install on an external hard drive or USB. Not the thing I was interested in. The sollution to my 'problem' illuded me.
Today I came across an article in the Personal Computer Magazine (PCM) issue of this month in which they wanted to boot the Vista Install DVD of a USB stick. Reading the article I found nothing that implied that it can only be used on a USB stick. So I grabed an old disk drive and fiddled around a bit.

After a numerous amount of reboots and trial&error I finally got it working! The Vista Installer booted from the disk drive. Although I have not completed a full install, I am quite sure it works.

The thing that annoyed me the most when booting from the DVD was that I had to wait quite some time for the white bar to fill, after which the actuall install environment showed up. Although it was faster, it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. I think it has to do with driver loading and lots of small files. My guess is that when you do a full install it you will notice a great increase in speed. The actual copying of files should go faster, although I have not yet tested this (maybe i'll test it in the future).

From the hindside the operation is quite simple. Maybe that is the reason I couldn't find it anywhere and havn't heard anybody trying it before.

However, a simple 'how-to' would probably in order, for the ones who where looking for this too

Things needed:

• A hard drive which has nothing on it (no partitions and stuff)
• A running Vista setup (i use 'diskpart' which is a part of vista and not of XP)
• A bootable Vista Install DVD (may be a slipstreamed disc. I used a Vista with SP1 slipstreamed)

Now the steps to follow:

1. Open a command prompt and run diskpart:   c:\> diskpart
2. View the lists of disks and find the appropriate disk:  list disk
3. Select the disk you want to use:  select disk 0
4. Verify that you have selected the right disk: list disk   (the one with the * is the selected disk)
5. clear the disk of all information: clean
6. create a partition: create partition
7. select the created partition: select partition 1
8. Make it active: active
9. Assign a drive letter: assign

This is almost identical to what PCM had in its article. However it didnt work correct for me. The PCM stated you should format the drive using FAT32 (using "format fs=32" between step 8 and 9). However, Vista is not always able to format a drive in the fat32 file system (which was the case with me).

I found out that vista is not able to format drives larger than 32GB in Fat32 filesystem. You can force it on a command prompt ( format /FS:FAT32 X: ). But most people say that drives larger than 32gb will slow down due to fat32 overhead. What I did was the folowing:

1. Open vista disk management:
2. Select your disk
3. Right click and select "shrink"
4. Shrink the disk to something below 32GB. (because you havn't used your disk this should be seconds)
5. Now right click it again and select 'format'
6. Choose Fat32 as the file system and check "Quick Format"

Now you are done preparing your disk!

Don't close your command prompt. You're not done yet...

Assuming your DVD drive is "D:" and your hdd "E:", copy the files from the drive to your newly made disk using xcopy (or any of your favorite copying programs, like robocopy for example).

c:\> xcopy d:\*.* /e /f e:\

Now you are done and you can close your command prompt.

You can use the rest of your disk if you'd like. Just create an extra partition and format it the way you like.

To boot from the disk, reboot your system and enter your BIOS. In the BIOS you have to make sure the boot priority are right. Make sure it boots from your HDD and not from your DVD (remove the DVD from the drive helps too). And make sure it boots from the correct disk.

If you have done everything correct, you should see the system booting from your new "Vista Install Bootable Hard Disk".  No more hours of waiting while installing your Vista!

Important Update (24-12-2008)

I was trying to install a fresh Vista 64 install on a machine which did not have a PATA controller and thus I was not able to boot from a DVD. So I was forced to use my own technique and install from a hard disk (yay).

I quickly ran into a problem which I hadn't noticed before because I did not complete a full install from HDD.

The problem lies within the Vista installer itself. When you boot from the HDD and enter the setup, chances are the installer starts to complain that it can not find a suitable CD/DVD/USB driver for the device where the installation source is located (duh, its a hard drive).

After hours of tinkering with RAID drivers (i didn't read it correctly and thought it was complaining about not finding the raid set) I finally noticed the problem. After some more google-ing I found a google cached item which explained that when you hold the CTRL key while booting the installer the setup will not be loaded and youll get a command prompt.

When on the command prompt, first go to the root ("cd \") then execute "bcdedit /createstore" and then enter "setup" and the setup will correctly start, and wont complain about the driver.