Install Windows Vista from a high speed USB 2.0 Flash Drive

Here's some step-by-step instructions on how we do this, some of which was adapted from Josh's instructions, again, kudos to Josh.

1. Acquire an ultra-fast USB 2.0 flash driveThe drive I and my coworkers recommend is the Apacer 4GB Handy Steno USB Flash Drive HT203, 200X Hi-Speed USB 2.0.  It's the fastest USB 2.0 Flash Drive that we've found - it has a read speed of 25MBytes/sec. & a write speed-14MBytes/sec and also works great as a ReadyBoost cache.
2. Format the Apacer Flash DriveRun CMD.EXE and type the following.  Note: This set of commands assumes that the USB flash drive is addressed as "disk 1".  you should double check that by doing a list of the disks (type "list disk") before cleaning it.  If you have multiple hard drives, like an SDFlash drive or a Multibay drive, you could end up wiping your second drive using this command. 
   (This was a warning that Josh added to his post along with the following commands that I copied from him, so kudos to Josh)
   1. diskpart
   2. select disk 1
   3. clean
   4. create partition primary
   5. select partition 1
   6. active
   7. format fs=fat32
   8. assign
   9. exit
      
3. Copy Windows Vista's DVD ROM content to the Flash DriveSimply issue the following command to start copying all the content from the Windows Vista DVD to your newly formatted high speed flash drive.
   • xcopy d:\*.* /s/e/f e:\

And that's it.  Boot up the machine, have it boot off the USB drive, and watch how fast the installation completes.  If you thought Windows Vista installed quickly before then let's see how you like it now.  The slowest part of the install will probably be the computer waiting for you to type in information in the setup fields, and even that can be automated using the Windows Automated Installation Kit.

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