Update: See the full sequence of instructions for the Windows Vista RTM here.

I've been following most of the Vista CTPs using a second HDD that I swap into my M200. I don't have a DVD burner and recently it seems my DVD drive has stopped working anyway - so I usually extract the Vista ISO to disk and launch setup from within the previous version.

With 5472 I was running into a few issues and wanted to do an install on a clean drive. This initially seemd a little difficult as all I have to boot from is the HDD (the M200 can boot from SD card, but thats another story). After going through all the usual hoops I worked out the basic steps to do so.

1. Format an NTFS drive.
2. Copy the "sources" and "boot" directories and the bootmgr, setup.exe files from the Vista ISO to the root of the new partition
3. Run boot/bootsect.exe against the new partition
4. Boot from the newly formatted drive.
5. Hold CTRL while booting.
6. Rebuild the BCD (bcdedit /createstore should do it)
7. Run setup.exe

Step 5 is, interesting. Holding CTRL will get you a command shell instead of starting setup as usual. This seems to be necessary as proceeding with installation as normal causes a prompt to install a missing third party CD/DVD driver. Launching setup from the new command shell avoids this.

Step 6 is necessary to allow setup to add a new entry to the BCD to boot Vista. When we copied the boot folder from the Vista ISO to the disk we copied a BCD store. While this allowed us to boot, it seems to error against the BCD tools.