Hey all. New to the forums. I apologize if this is not in the right thread and would have no qualms if a mod needed to relocate it. The jist of the story here is that I have a 40GB Laptop HDD enclosed in an external casing that I can connect to my pc via USB. The drive is formatted with NTFS. I have an old Dell Inspiron 1100, which cannot boot to USB and currently does not have a functional CDROM drive. I want to try, just for the heck of it, to install Windows to this 40GB HDD and then slap it into the Inspiron. I know it probably won't boot into Windows or may BSOD but even if that is the case I'd have Windows on an external drive that I could carry around with me. I have an image of the install disc that I mount with Daemon Tools. The drive is G: and the HDD's drive is F:. When the image is mounted and the drive is attached I try to run G:\I386\winnt32.exe /syspart:F: /tempdrive:F: /makelocalsource /noreboot but receive an error from Vista stating that WINNT32 has known compatibility issues and that the version on this computer is newer than that on the disc. I guess I may be overlooking something here but I am not trying to install this OS onto my computers HDD but the HDD in the enclosure. I thought that stating F: is the target in the command line would have let Windows know this... My fiance's laptop has XP on it but I wanted to do this here just in case anything goes wrong. I could just reinstall Vista as it is on it's own patition. Any help or advice here would be appreciated.