Vista - USB Bootable Vista Installation Flash Thumb Drive

Well I'd like to try and install Win7 RC using a thumb drive. I created and preped my thumb drive including making the partition Active and it is rdy once I get RC downloaded to copy the files over to it but I'm not sure how one gets the system to boot from it. I'm using an Asus P6T Deluxe V2 MB and when I look in the bios for boot order I have 3 options. Floppy, CD/DVD, & HD so not sure what I need to do once I copy the files over to the thumb drive so I can boot from it.

It depends on the age of your machine and your BIOS.
Look for something like 'Boot Order' and USB
For example it might be:
USB Diskette on Key/USB Hard Drive
USB Floppy
USB CD/DVD ROM Drive
Set any of these before the Internal CD/DVD ROM Drive and Internal Hard Drive.
OR
On booting your machine there might be key to press to temporally set the boot order.
If you see no mention of USB or a way of setting a USB device to boot before the CD/DVD or Hard Drive then either your machine doesn't have this option or is older before this option became common.

well the p6t Deluxe V2 MB is one of the newest x58 chipset MB's by Asus that supports the I7 cpu. Only became available end of Jan or beginning of Feb this year

Hey Shawn, instead of Write (7. Click on Bootable (menu bar) and Wite Disk Image. (See screenshot above), you have typed in wite by mistake I guess.....

Cheers..

LOL, oops. It has been corrected.

Thank you,
Shawn

Butterfingers, lol

my flash drive should be more than 4GB??? can i zip a few folders ?

Hello Inc2000,

If you mean to add a few ZIP folders to the USB drive after making it a Vista boot USB Key, then yes you sure can.

Welcome, Shawn

Cheers..

Hi Brink,

I came across this sticky through google and it is very helpful. I just have one question. Am I right in understanding that in order to make a bootable USB drive that installs Vista 64 bit I need to create the bootable USB within a 64 bit OS? Or, did I misunderstand that?

If so - why is that a requirement? All we are doing is writing a image file to the USB drive.