The reason why is pretty simple, DVDs are not remotely as fast as any other media, and in 2009, it’s starting to show. Flash drives are larger, faster, and more versatile than DVDs, and they’re costing less and less. But what about an older system that can not boot from USB storage? Well, there is an option, and that’s to use the destination drive as the source. Install the drive into a separate computer (via a usb dongle is fine) and follow these steps. Note that these directions work if you’re trying to make a bootable USB flash drive, too.
First on a different system you should remove all existing partitions and create new ones (optional), then set the partition as active, give it a boot loader, then give it the installation files.
Making partitions and setting the drive as active
First execute diskpart.exe from inside of a console. You’ll need to determine which drive is the hard drive you intend to do this to. Type in list disk. From now on, the drive number will be referred to as n.
select disk n
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=NTFS quick
assign
exit
clean will remove all existing partitions, then the partition is made and selected, active will mark is at an active partition which signals a bootloader to use this partition, the partition is then formatted, and mounted. Determine the drive letter assigned to the partition, this will be referred to as m.
Installing the boot loader
Using the bootsect.exe executable found in the \boot\ directory of your Vista or Windows 7 DVD, install Windows Boot Manager (BOOTMGR) onto the drive using bootsect.exe /nt60 m: . I can confirm that using a 32 bit executable to make a 64 bit installer does work, and vice versa.
That’s it! You’re all done! Boot from the drive and the installer will run.