Want to install Windows Vista w/o cd

Question

I have Windows installers that I obtained through my university. The installers come in the form of an .iso archive that contains the setup.exe file and autorun.inf. My notebook does not have a cd burner, nor do I want to go that option. Additionally The .iso archives do not contain any boot info, so some of the other methods I have investigated don't work for me. Currently I am able to boot Windows Vista on my old drive so if there is a process I can do from there that should work. I have a USB stick that is big enough to hold the Vista .iso. So is there a way to make my USB stick install Vista, and how do I do that without the boot files that I would normally obtain from a cd? Thank you.

EDIT:
I am trying to install to a fresh hard drive. I cannot just run the setup from my old drive. It is a notebook so I cannot have one drive be slave.

EDIT #2:
The installers that I have are not the standard ones from a Windows DVD.

Answer 1

You can use WinToFlash to builds USB sticks from Windows installs:

You would need to mount the iso as a virtual disk.

EDIT

Did I understand correctly that you're trying to replace an old system disk with a new one, while staying with Vista as the operating system ?
If that's the case, you don't need an installation cd at all : just image your existing drive to the usb, replace the disk and image it back. To do that, Install Clonezilla Live on the usb as bootable - the documentation in the above link explains it all.

Answer 2

From a command prompt, and assuming you only have one HDD, plug the flash drive in and run

diskpart
select disk 1
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32
exit

If you have more than one HDD then list disk in Diskpart will show you which one you want.

This will make your flash drive bootable and ready for the files.

Then copy the contents of the .iso to the flash drive. You can extract the contents with 7-Zip

Edit: After reading your comments, the reason that you cannot boot your CD is because your school gave you a CD containing only SP1, not the complete operating system.

Answer 3

Assuming you have some relatively recent version of Windows already installed, and you don't need to repartition anything, there's an even easier method of installing Vista that doesn't even require a USB stick.

Simply mount the ISO (Daemon tools, etc), and tell it to install in your current partition (or, even better, if you already have a different partition to install to, tell it to install there). It will copy the files over before rebooting, so you don't need the physical media at any point.

Be warned, though, if the install fails for whatever reason, and you installed over your old version of Windows, you will probably need physical media to recover it.

Answer 4

Microsoft Has an official tool for this.

http://store.microsoft.com/Help/ISO-Tool

Answer 5

None of the methods worked so I decided to install XP first because my XP .iso came with the boot files. Still it was not an easy task to get to work. I eventually found WinSetupFromUSB which is a fantastic program for getting your USB to boot XP. The program has a walkthrough that tells you exactly what you need to do, all of which can be done through the program. The best part of this is that it does not expect you to have a cd drive or a floppy drive (most of the others did).

WinSetupFromUSB can be found here