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How To Make Vista Bootable DVD with WIM Downloaded Files.

If you have purchased Windows Vista online and taken the delivery of the latest operating system via web download from Windows Marketplace, you would end up with a few downloads with .wim and .exe file extensions. Rather than paying additional shipping and handling charges, you can burn or create a bootable ISO DVD image from downloaded Vista files with the following trick, where the .iso image can subsequently write to a DVD. The DVD created will be the typical 32-bit Windows Vista DVD that available in retail channel, and can be used to clean install.

How to make a bootable Windows Vista ISO DVD media

1. Put all 3 downloaded files (namely install.wim, boot.wim and an executable X13-49120.exe) in the same folder (for this tutorial, let’s assume the files are put on C:\ else you need to modify the path accordingly).

2. Run the X13-49120.exe executable. Windows Vista Setup Preparation will create a new folder “Vista” inside the folder and will populate the folder with all necessary Vista setup files which takes up about 2.52 GB disk space.
3. Exit from the Install Windows screen.
4. Download CDimage 2.52. (link Removed)
5. Extract CDimage from CDimage.zip to the C:\ root directory.
6. Open a command prompt shell, and run the following command:
cdimage.exe -lVISTA_EN_DVD -m -u2 -bC:\Vista\boot\etfsboot.com C:\Vista\ C:\Vistax86.iso

Bootable Windows Vista x86 DVD ISO image in UDF format will be created as vistax86.iso in C:\ or any folder you specified above.

7. Burn the newly create ISO with a CD/DVD burning software such as Nero or Alcohol 120%. Try to burn at low speed (i.e. 4X) and turn on verification to ensure that the DVD creation is fine.
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Information purposes only to assist those whom have received Vista the above mentioned way. If you have X13-49121.exe which is X64 the same method will work.