Recently I managed to do some damage to a Vista install (note to self - while resizing a partition from a Linux app works it's best to follow the instructions EXACTLY) and needed to run a repair.
Being a lightweight and ultra modern machine the one thing that was lacking was any sort of removable spindle media... like a DVD drive. That meant I needed to be able to create a bootable USB thumbdrive that I could copy my Vista ISO onto in order to run the repair (originally I'd used an external DVD drive but I didn't have it and needed my machine quickly) so... on my other Vista machine (everyone should have two computers) I fired up a command prompt in adminstrator elevated mode (find Command Prompt in the programs list, right click, "run as administrator" then followed these easy steps:
Run Diskpart at the cmd prompt and then enter these commands
- Rescan
- List disk (will list all your disks)
- Select disk # (where # is what you found from the previous step for your usb key)
- Clean
- Create part pri
- Select part 1
- Format fs=ntfs quick
- Active
- Exit
You USB key is now bootable and you can copy the contents of the iso across, plug it into the other machine, reboot and ... voila - I'm trying this from the repaired machine.