I just got done with running the upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate x64 on my previous Vista Ultimate x64 system. 

Kudos, two thumbs up, hooray and well done!

Painless, quick, efficient, transparent.  System is performing like a charm.  The only one visible change was that it swapped my wallpaper.

I needed a virtual machine to test an application in isolation and realized I didn’t have any of my .vhd images on hand.  

I looked around and came across this collection of downloadable VHDs directly from Microsoft, pre-activated, for both Vista and XP with different versions of IE including IE6 (XP only), IE7 & IE8.

The OSes are trial versions (of course) and expire January 1st for the XP installs and 120 days after first use for the Vista images.

Images require at least 1.5GB of HD space once expanded, so make sure you have some room available for it.

This is a follow up to an earlier post, that deserves an entry of its own. 

So, after I failed to find a more "direct" way to install Vista on a machine without a DVD drive, and with options that included solutions I was trying to avoid (namely purchasing any additional hardware), I set out to investigate ways to install Vista (or any other OS for that matter) from a USB bootable flash drive. 

This is a somewhat detailed account of my approach and ultimate solution.

Of course we all start at Google! Where else? I then landed at Jeff Gonzales' Blog Post, which in a very concise manner stated that he was able to do it and gave credit to this guys' blog post where the meat on how to go about creating an bootable USB drive with a Vista Image on it.

All of the information was very relevant, however not 100% ...hmm shall we say infallible, favoring the term over accurate.

Thanks to Jeff's blog post I also learned about vLite, which is an AWESOME tool that will basically allow you to manipulate and configure the install image of Vista going from a full bloated original image to lean mean install image, customized to include (or better yet exclude) the features of your liking, and also allowing to set certain behavior by default after a clean install like whether or not to start with UAC enabled/disabled... very nice. 

This is of course a free tool.  I however decided to donate to the author, a nominal amount nonetheless but certainly well deserved.  I don't see myself using this tool more than once or twice, but since (get this) it WORKS and does so in a very elegant and easy to use manner, I went ahead and bought the guy a latte!

The caveat to the aforementioned solution as stated in the source blog posts, is that the XP version of Diskpart command does not support UBS devices and although the post clearly describes the steps to ultimately accomplish the desired goal, it fails to disclose that one needs to run the partitioning process (when using Diskpart) from a Vista installation.  Luckily, I do have a Vista system and was able to successfully partition, format and make the USB flash drive bootable.

So, the skinny, the step by step? 

• Have your Vista install disk or image handy, ready, available.
• You can use the image as is, or play around with vLite and make a smaller, customized image, but this of course is a totally optional step.  You may be motivated to use vLite if your USB flash drive is not large enough to hold the original 2.5GB Vista image.  In my case, I used a smaller 2GB USB flash drive that perfectly held the leaner 1.5GB image I created using vLite
• From a Vista system, connect your USB flash drive to an available USB port, open a Command window (cmd.exe) and execute the following steps, being EXTREMELLY CAREFUL to refer to the correct disk when issuing the partitioning commands.

1. Diskpart
2. list disk  << view list of disks. CORRECT # from this list in the next step is CRITICAL for your system's safety
3. select disk n  << Replace n with the CORRECT disk #
4. create partition primary
5. select partition 1
6. active
7. format fs=fat32
8. exit

 You need to have the USB flash drive and the Vista image available and ready for the next step.

• If you are using an .iso image, and have it mounted on a logical disk drive, or if you are using a DVD as a source, use the appropriate drive letter as the source in the following command

1. xcopy x:\*.* /s/e/f  y:\

where x: is the source drive (your mounted .iso or DVD drive) and the y:\ is your USB flash drive.

Voila! Now you *should* have a bootable install image of Vista (hopefully lean, mean and custom) on a USB flash drive.

As I wrote this post, the install was taking place... it finished before I finished the post.  What does that tell you?  Either I am a lousy, lousy typist (which could very well be the case) or installing from a USB flash drive is wickedly fast and sprinkled with awesomeness!

Now on to making my new Vista install a usable, practical Media Center solution.

I have a feeling (more like a very educated guess) that this will be "the" April Weekly project, if nothing else because we are half way through the month.

This is a kick-off of sorts.  I'll treat it as such.

I have an older Dell Optiplex GX280 SFF desktop that I will be installing Vista Home Premium on and running for nothing other than (mainly) Media Center.  It will live in the family room to manage and display pictures and home videos. On the latter I tend to transfer all video to DVD media rather than back to digital and that in and off itself is looking like a project of its own.

It will run Miro in order to leverage the power of the media on the Internet.  I am excited and somewhat surprised that a tool such as this actually supports Vista, but I am not complaining.

Side note:  I may be one of the few of "us" professional geek who hasn't fully embraced Vista as my main OS yet, but I have very concrete plans about that which I plan to share here shortly.

The max RAM this board will take is 2GB and as is it currently sports 1GB.  Even better news is that of course it consists of 2 x 512MB sticks on 2 available slots, so I'll be losing those.  This past Friday I ordered the new RAM, consisting on 2 x 1GB sticks which I got for a pretty good deal (after rebate).

I installed a new 250GB Seagate Drive in it, and a SFF eVGA e-GeForce MX 4000 PCI video card I happened to have for I-have-no-idea-what-reason precisely fitting the small form factor this box requires.  I think this should be enough to satisfy my main purpose for this machine.

Part of the project is the hard-wiring of the family room area by a professional firm.  Their rate is so reasonable I cannot in my right mind favor the idea of me spending 8 frustrating hours and accomplishing (maybe) a half ass result, over paying someone $200 or $300 and in the end having something that works, looks good and professionally done, and most importantly gives me someone to blame if anything goes wrong :D ... OF COURSE I am just kidding.  Accountability and issue ownership and resolution is at the top of my list of traits to continue to work on.

The first step in this project, and until the RAM arrives and the cabling is done, is to start the installation of Vista Home Premium tonight.  If time allows (ok, read: If Wife Allows), I'll setup some stuff, play around, etc.  But the main goal is to get Vista installed.

This would be a perfect time for me to segue into a deeper analysis of the conceptualization, planning & execution of a simple idea such as this one, and I will, but for now I didn't want to end without expressing how much of a relief it feels like to actually have a concrete, simple and thus doable plan.  There is no measure that would allow me to express how much it bothered me to not have done this simply because It wasn't the "perfect" solution, resulting in me never doing it because of excuse after excuse of the self-sabotage kind.

And off we go, installation has begun...

UPDATE: Smallish oversight on my part.  The Dell GX280 box I have been working with, does not sport a DVD drive, hence the install took a sudden halt until I figure out what to do about that (of course I assume we all know that Vista installs from a DVD -size- distribution). 

Possible solutions that come to mind are to use an external DVD drive, which I don't have and would have to borrow or buy.  Another solution is possibly purchasing a DVD drive from eBay for the GX280 or install from a bootable USB flash drive.  At all costs, I want to avoid BUYING any other components or soon enough it would have made perfect sense to buy a new machine for this solution, negating the fun inherently part of this project.

FINAL UPDATE: I cover the solution and final project outcome in more detail in the next post.