Help installing XP, no CD drive or floppy disk drive.

T

TGA

Gawd
Joined
Jun 26, 2004
Messages
825
I seem to remember this question being asked and answered the other week but I just can’t seem to find the post. I am still googleing the solution but the sites I have found all seem to suggest contradicting things and or are rather vague about the whole thing. So I would appreciate it if someone who has done this could give me some tips or maybe even a step by step.

I already have the hard drive removed from the laptop and mounted in an external USB enclosure. I also have my whole XP CD copied to the hard drive and have now slipstreamed SP2 in to it.

What I am unsure about is what the best way to format the drive is going to be and then what files I need to copy over to it so that when I put the drive back in to the laptop it will boot to it and allow me to run the install.

Thanks
 
Is it really that easy? With the drive just formatted as NTFS what will the laptop boot too?

If it wasn’t for the fact that it is a pain to get USB drives working in dos I would have booted from a DOS disk and formatted the drive with /s making it bootable to DOS and then ran the install.

What “OS” is going to be loading from a NTFS formatted disk that will give me the command line to run the install? Sorry if this is a stupid question.

I guess what I have really been looking for is some utility that I can run from within XP that will allow me to format the drive /s like I always did from DOS on the Win9x platforms.
 
Oh, haha, lol. Sorry, COMPLETELY missed the "absolutely nothing else to boot from" part of your post. :eek:

You could get a USB flash drive, make it bootable, then boot off that guy to start the installation like you did with Windows 98 and its bootdisk.

Sorry about TOTALLY missing the point of your question. Long week. :p
 
Install xp to the laptops disk while it's in the other computer (just bareley installed no drivers or anything) , copy whatever drivers you need to the disk and then put the disk back in the laptop.. Reboot hope for the best.. I give it some chance of working..
 
Well I brought a bunch of blank CD’s to work with me today so I guess I am going to try creating a DOS boot CD that has support for USB. With a little luck I will hopefully get DOS to see that laptops hard drive attached to the PC by USB and format it /s.

Wish me luck

Assuming I am successful I will report back here with what I had to do. Maybe it will help someone else down the road.
 
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