By USB drive I mean an external USB DVD drive. Plug it into one of the craptop's USB ports, set the BIOS to boot from there (assuming you can get to the BIOS) and begin the install.
There is a way, though, to copy the DVD's contents to an external USB Hard drive.
But you would need a utility to set the USB hard drive to bootable. I know there is something "out there" to do this but I can't think of the name of the utility.
Time to Google it and find the utility.
BOAC - I have indeed found the utility. It's called make_bootable and can be found here:
http://www.megaleecher.net/uploads/Make_bootable.zip
Thus, if you have an external USB hard drive, copy the entire contents of the DVD to the USB drive and then run the make_bootable utility. (The utility does not work with FAT32 and NTFS file systems. You would have to reformat the USB drive to FAT)
--------------------------- OR MORE PREFERABLE-------------------
1. First format your USB drive in NTFS file system. You can do it by attaching your USB drive to a nicely behaving system and then format it from My Computer window.
2. Now open Command Prompt window from Start menu. Right-click on Command Prompt entry in start menu and select "Run as administrator" option.
3. Now type
diskpart in Command Prompt window and press Enter. It'll launch DiskPart program:
4. Now provide following command:
list volume
It'll show a list of all drives in your system. Look for your USB drive entry. As in the below screenshot, the USB drive is "
G" which you can determine from its "
Type" entry.
Now you have to select the USB drive volume by providing
select volume no. command. Since in our case volume no. of USB drive is "Volume 4", the command would be:
select volume 4
Now we have to make this drive active. So provide
active command:
active
Now exit from DiskPart using
exit command.
5. Now we need to create
Boot sector on USB drive. We'll use "
bootsect.exe" utility for this task. You can find this utility in Windows Vista setup disk. It'll be present in "
Boot" directory.
Now provide following command in Command Prompt:
bootsect /nt60 G: Here
G is drive letter of USB drive. Replace it with the correct drive letter if your system has some other letter for USB drive.
6. At last, copy all files/folders from Vista Setup DVD to your USB drive and you have done.
Now you can boot using your USB drive and can install Windows Vista in any system.