Want to install Windows Vista w/o cd

Want to install Windows Vista w/o cd

I have Windows installers that I obtained through my university. The installers come in the form of an .iso archive that contains the setup.exe file and autorun.inf. My notebook does not have a cd burner, nor do I want to go that option. Additionally The .iso archives do not contain any boot info, so some of the other methods I have investigated don't work for me. Currently I am able to boot Windows Vista on my old drive so if there is a process I can do from there that should work. I have a USB stick that is big enough to hold the Vista .iso. So is there a way to make my USB stick install Vista, and how do I do that without the boot files that I would normally obtain from a cd? Thank you.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 273

Total answers/comments: 2

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Guest [Entry]

"You can use WinToFlash to builds USB sticks from Windows installs:

You would need to mount the iso as a virtual disk.

EDIT

Did I understand correctly that you're trying to replace an old system disk with a new one, while staying with Vista as the operating system ?
If that's the case, you don't need an installation cd at all : just image your existing drive to the usb, replace the disk and image it back. To do that, Install Clonezilla Live on the usb as bootable - the documentation in the above link explains it all."

Guest [Entry]

"Assuming you have some relatively recent version of Windows already installed, and you don't need to repartition anything, there's an even easier method of installing Vista that doesn't even require a USB stick.

Simply mount the ISO (Daemon tools, etc), and tell it to install in your current partition (or, even better, if you already have a different partition to install to, tell it to install there). It will copy the files over before rebooting, so you don't need the physical media at any point.

Be warned, though, if the install fails for whatever reason, and you installed over your old version of Windows, you will probably need physical media to recover it."