install windows from hard drive?

[dualblade]

i know i had read that you could do this but i'm not sure exactly how it's done. you copy all the files over to the hard drive and it boots and installs windows without the need for a cd rom. goes much faster this way and i'd like to try it. anyone know what needs to be done or has a link to how to do it? thanks

 

[djnes]

You'd have to create a partition, xcopy the entire CD to that partition and then run winnt32 from there. However, when you factor all of this in (which is time consuming) to the fact the setup doesn't run much faster anyway, it's a complete waste of time. Boot from the CD and install it the normal way. If your having a problem of not being able to boot from CD, post the details and we'll help.

 

[[MS]]

The architecture directory on the Windows CD (i386, or IA64, or AMD64) has all the files required for setup. However, the drive still has to be bootable such that you can launch the installer. How you make the drive bootable is up to you.

 

[rcolbert]

There's not much benefit to installing from hard drive these days. Having the entire i386 directory at C:\ helps if you want to install additional Windows components later, but you can alwasy easily copy i386 to your hard drive any time after the fact as well. I think you'd spend a whole lot more time and effort kludging together the install from hard drive process than you would by simply inserting the CD and letting nature take its course.

Whichever way you go, using an SP2 slipstreamed version is a good idea, especially if you're going to keep i386 on your system after the installation.