hi guys nice forum. Long story short = computer owned by virus, needs fresh clean install. I don't have vista disks but have an image of the vista installation saved on an external hard drive. I also burned the image to DVD but my DVD player/reader is highly unreliable and often fails to read disks. My only option is the external HD. Can you install vista from an external hard drive? If so how? I have backed up all my files on the HD. The virus made my system unstable so its unable to shutdown or install/uninstall most applications. I have a Dell recovery partition but it fails to trigger (Ctrl+F11 doesn't work). So this is my only option I think.. anyone help? Computer specs : Vostro 1700 C2D T7500 Processor 2.2GHz, Windows Vista® Business 17.0" Widescreen WUXGA TFT Display 2.0 megapixel webcam 2048MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM 160GB (5400RPM) SATA Hard Drive 256MB nVidia® GeForce® 8600M GT 8X DVD+/-RW Drive Primary 9-cell Battery
