Vista Installed on USB Hard drive

I hope this method is easy to do and will help anyone looking for the vista usb solution. This avoids any ghosting or copying over of OS install to different drives.

Avoids cross mounting registry hives.

Drawback: Needs another drive plugged in sata or ide channel or BSOD after install procedure (used or unused). Meaning this only boots off usb vista, if there is another hard drive present in the system. Has something to do with vista verification of disk drives. The ide or sata drive doesnt need to boot, it just needs to be present. (seen this with some hardware, others boot fine without any other attached drives)

If usb boot is slow its not the install but the hardware bios support on the system.

Vista wont start installation on a USB interface no matter what. It is embedded in its OS which I wasn't able to track down.
So I decided to use VMWARE 6 (may work with older vmware not sure).
You can download vmware and an evaluation license for 30 days can be emailed to you.

You can also try the free server version of vmware assuming it will work the same.




Here's How:

1) Download vmware install it. (vmware is easy to use)Download VMware Workstation for multiple operating systems - VMware


2) Create a new vmware for windows, pick custom pick lsi logic as scsi card (vista has support for this card) use cdrom or iso as you wish for the vista install CD.

3) Have your usb drive u want to install on, plugged in. Vmware will see this device as physical drive 1 (0 being your OS) use physical disk(advanced) of your usb drive. Make sure you pick the correct physical drive (drive 1 usually) or else you might wipe the current OS drive.

4) Use entire disk.

5) Click advanced on disk in virtual machine settings. Click on independent
and persistent changes for the disk.

6) Now, please remove all assigned letters in disk management for the USB drive
(If you dont u can corrupt an install that way).
Also make sure you format the drive during vista install inside vmware. If it is already formatted you still need to format during vista install (or else u might get corrupt boot as crcdisk error).

Vmware will show that drive as scsi disk under lsi logic controller, this is fine as vista will install on a scsi disk.

7) Boot and go through the vista install procedure in vmware.

8) Let vista boot to the desktop the first time in the vmware inside vmware vista do
If there are no "group" string values add them in for those services
(This is because when you boot into regular desktop out of vmware it will find new usb interface and mess up the startup type.)

9) shutdown vista

10) close vmware

11) Now reboot your machine and select USB boot drive from bios boot. Machine should now boot to vista desktop.

* Be careful about it finding new usb devices and to add drivers. Make sure the
start type and groups dont change on the usb services (verify in regedit).
It will find your current hardware's usb device and install drivers for it.
problem is it can overwrite the original usb*.inf file and add new params into it.
double check this or when you reboot again boot will fail.
If you do windows update, fix the registry or it will fail. Update adds new files like the original.
After the drivers get installed for the first time it is safe to assume you wont
have to deal with it being reinstalled unless you goto another machine.
Of course you can always go back to the vmware instance and fix it there.


Hope its simple and straight forward. You can probably install xp and 200(0,3) this way too. (may need
lsi logic drivers to find boot disk though, vista,win2k3 has it natively)
EDIT: xp and windows 200(0,3) exhibit the same behavior of BSOD during boot. Even after
copying usbstor.sys and other files from driver cache cabs. So xp and win2k3 dont work currently.
Still maybe salvageable with other tweaks out there.

The is another way to get WAIK tools for vista and regedit the above changes directly in the boot(1,2).wim
and install(1,2,3,4,5,6).wim but I will leave that out to the daring. Vista installer still wont
do direct usb install though even with those usb service changes in the image.

If your drive doesnt show up under vmware for use then its targetting as removeable device.
you can install the xpfildrvr driver (the hitachi driver) to remedy that. (mostly for usb flash drives)
Careful about USB stick since it needs additional drivers to stop those write cycles in windows.
But atleast the install should be straight forward. No need for extra copying or dealing with
non working boot sectors as the install is directly on the destination.



Lazy mans quick install...
Here is a working INF file which you can copy (by assigning deassigning drive letters to your usb drive)
put it in c:\ of your windows install, inside vmware right click install the inf file. It wont change the usb
inf files for you but it will add the reg and copy usbstor.sys for you. For those who dont want to regedit and such...