Installing Vista From HDD

I'd just like to say, I tried it, and it worked.

First I made a 3.00GB partition using GParted, then rebooted into XP, and copied the entire contents of the Vista Home Premium disk onto this. Then when it had finished copying, (took a while lol) I used the setup.exe in the root of the partition and installed.

The install was just like doing it from the dvd, just quite a bit faster.
I have also tested that setting the partition to active using the windows diskmgmt.msc or GParted works, just like booting from the DVD.

This would make it very easy for vlite testing

Hope this helps someone.

duksandfish

 

That's a rather useful bit of info; thanks! Just out of curiousity, any idea if the same would work with XP itself?

 

I haven't tried it, but I guess it would work.

 

I'm just such a lazy bum that I thought I'd see if you'd already done the hard work for me.

But seriously, it is very useful to know that this can be done at all; perhaps I'm missing something, but it strikes me that this would be a very good way to create one's own "hidden recovery partition" without, at the same time, having to reinstall all of the bloatware that originally came on the system.

 

Heh, I just noticed, it even comes up with the same Icon as the Dvd in my computer:

 

Also works just as well to install from a USB/flash drive too with none fiddling about required with past versions, you can just format it, make sure it's active, copy the contents of the DVD across and away you go.

 

Tested it with XP, and it didn't work - it wouldn't boot.

 

You don´t need to make an dedicated partition for it...

Just grab your .iso Vista image while on your predecessor OS, and mount it with any virtual drive software like Daemon Tools or Alcohol 52/120%. Then run setup.exe.

The Vista installation process copies all the needed files to the selected partition, so there is no need of any media support upon 1st restart. On the contrary, XP will require the media support upon restart.