Formatting a usb hard drive from inside XP to boot DOS

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kagebarton

Limp Gawd
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Dec 5, 2005
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I have a laptop that has no external drives (as in I can't boot from anything other than the internal harddrive)

I want to install XP on it, so I took the laptop HDD out, put it in a USB enclosure, formatted it as FAT32 in my XP desktop, set the partition as active, and copied the files from a Windows ME DOS bootdisk to it, along with the XP cd files so I can run the installation from DOS. Put it back into the laptop, and it gives me a "Remove all disks and media. Hit any key to restart." message on boot.

What am I doing wrong? Any help would be much appreciated.
 
Also of note, I can only access this drive in Windows XP right now (I am still trying to figure out how I can access it in DOS when I boot off a floppy on my desktop).
 
Just copying the boot files from the floppy won't make the drive bootable. Boot from the floppy and run the sys command to make the hard drive bootable.

Sys is used to copy the system files from one drive to another drive, allowing that drive to be bootable.

When running sys, the below files will be copied.

command.com
io.sys
msdos.sys
drvspace.bin

Availability

The sys.com command is an external command and is available in

All Versions of MS-DOS
Windows 95
Windows 98
Windows NT

Syntax

Copies MS-DOS system files and command interpreter to a disk you specify.

SYS [drive1:][path] drive2:

[drive1:][path] Specifies the location of the system files.
drive2: Specifies the drive the files are to be copied to.

Examples

sys a:

If you type this from c drive and you have a formatted disk in the drive, this would copy the system files to that disk making that disk bootable.
 
The problem is he has no external drives, and I'm going to assume that means floppy drive too.



I know that Winimage can expand a disk image and resize it to the destination media. Can you download a disk from bootdisk.com and expand it onto the hard drive using winimage? You might have to make it active after that, but I'm not sure.
 
Can I run that from the command prompt in Windows XP? I cannot access the drive after booting from a DOS floppy because it is a USB drive.
 
Ops sorry, I was rushed to get out the door this morning when I made my other post. No I don't think you can sys the drive from XP's command window. You should be able to accomplish what you want using the winnt32/syspart command. Format the external drive, ntfs if you want then navigate to the i386 folder on the xp CD and run winnt32/syspart from the command line. The /syspart parameter for Winnt32.exe causes Windows XP Setup to copy all the necessary boot files and temporary Setup files to a drive and mark the partition as active. You can then install the drive in another computer, turn the computer on, and continue with Setup.
 
Can't you just do like a...

format E: /s

replace E with the drive letter, that should format the drive and copy over the system files so it will boot. You can run this from the command prompt in windows.
 
XP's format command won't recognize the /s switch. No dos system files to transfer in an NT based OS. Keep in mind that XP's command window is not a dos window, you don't have all the same commands you have in a dos environment. It might work if you ran a:\format E: /s. "a:\" being the dos floppy and E: being the drive you want to format. In that case a:\sys E: might work without having to format the drive again. Just be careful and don't mess up your drive letters.
 
sony or samsung had an application that would format your USB drive to be bootable... the thumbdrive was called "something"stick. I've archived it and I'll try to remember what the utility was called.
 
It's a hard drive in an external enclosure that connects via USB. I don't think that utility will work. You could try it but I'm doubtful.
 
alphanumeric said:
It's a hard drive in an external enclosure that connects via USB. I don't think that utility will work. You could try it but I'm doubtful.
Click to expand...

It's worked for me on HDDs in USB enclosures as well as USB HDDs (basically the same thing anyway) in the past. It's worth a shot anyway.

I don't think the utility cares so long as it's some kind of USB mass storage device...
 
I've tried several make your thumb drive bootable utilities in the past. They all worked on my 2 gig thumb drive but not on my 4 gig thumb drive. :confused: If it works on large drives it may solve my problem. I'll have to give it a try on that thumb drive.
 
I have the same issue as the OP. I am going to try the winnt32/syspart options to see if that work, but if anyone can provide me with a instructions on how to make a bootable dos cd with usb support then i should be able to make my laptop drive bootable and do it that way if the winnt32/syspart doesnt work.

Does anyone have a link to instruction on how to perform the winnt32/syspart command correctly?
 
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