Installing XP on an older laptop

F

fender

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 2, 2003
Messages
417
I have a P3 Celeron laptop that originally came with XP on which I'd like to do a format. The problem is that it cannot boot off of the CD, and in order to fix this a bios update would be required. I do not have a floppy drive and I can't boot from the bios update CD I've made since I need to update the bios to be able to boot from a CD. It's a vicious cycle. :p

Anyways, would it be possible to install XP by copying the install files on to the laptop's hard drive with another computer and then booting from it?

I've also thought about using a USB drive but since the laptop is so old I doubt it can boot off of one.

Any other ideas?
 
You can install XP on it, within XP. It copies setup files then reboots and begins the installation process. What OS do you have on it right now? Also, sometimes you can get lucky and get WinFlash utilities to flash your bios in Windows.
 
Welcome to the wonderful world of "Oh shit, no bootable optical drive, no booting from USB devices, no installation over the network, oh crap how the hell do I get Windows installed on this old POS..." which is a very common thing, believe it or not.

P3 Celeron, eh... anyone else see the irony? :)

The short short version is yes it's possible to do an installation of XP directly from the i386 folder on the hard drive. The trick is getting it there, in a manner which leaves it accessible and useful. Another tool is essential but not absolutely required: smartdrv.exe which will speed up the installation process considerably, especially on that older machine. You'll have to track that down yourself.

The methodology goes something like this

- the hard drive needs to be bootable already, meaning bootable in the old DOS sense as you'll need access to high memory to use smartdrv.exe and the ems386 memory manager
- the files need to be on the drive already, meaning the i386 folder and smartdrv.exe as well
- you have to boot to a DOS prompt, then access the i386 directory, run smartdrv.exe, when it's loaded, then you execute the winnt.exe command to start the text mode setup of XP

Problem is, XP doesn't have the ability to boot to a DOS prompt. Command Prompt, yes, but that's not what you need. You'll need a bare bones actual MS-DOS prompt and, the other issue that can cramp all of this from the start is the file system in place: if it's NTFS, it's a nightmare.

You need to make that whole hard drive FAT32 or you're gonna be dead in the water. Typically I split off a chunk of a drive on such a laptop, about 1GB at the end of it and make a 1GB partition, formatted as FAT32 so that I have someplace to place the i386 installation directory and smartdrv.exe. Once that's accomplished, then it's a matter of making the drive bootable to a simple MS-DOS prompt, which typically means using a 98SE boot loader.

This gets complicated really quick, I promise, and I've had to do this a few thousand times over the years. The hard drive in the laptop needs to be removed, attached to another machine that has access to a bootable optical drive, could be another newer laptop, it doesn't matter.

Easiest way to accomplish all this:

1) Pull the hard drive out and attach it to a machine with a bootable optical drive option, meaning the machine can boot off the optical drive - can be a desktop, can be another laptop as just mentioned

2) Boot off a 98SE (or any 9x CD really, I just use 98SE as the standard response) and use fdisk to wipe the hard drive of all partitions, then create your Primary partition on the drive leaving 1GB of space at the end of it for the Extended/Logical partition, you'll need to reboot and get booted back off the CD again, and both partitions get formatted as FAT32 at this point using format.com after the reboot. When they're formatted, type sys c: to transfer system boot files to the C: drive and then test the ability to boot off the hard drive right then and there - if it won't boot off that basically empty but formatted hard drive with the system files transferred from the CD, you're dead in the water. As long as the machine boots off that hard drive at this point, you're home free. Reboot once more off the CD - you'll need to be doing this off the CD this time.

3) Run smartdrv.exe - it's on the 98SE CD someplace, I just can't remember exactly where at this moment. I think it's actually sitting on the RAMdisk you get when you boot off that 98SE CD, check for it, then copy it to the second partition while you're at it. When you're positive smartdrv.exe is running - run the command twice in a row (smartdrv.exe); it'll tell you it's functional and show the RAM caching info.

4) Take out the 98SE CD and insert the XP CD. Copy the entire i386 directory to that secondary partition using the xcopy command to get everything. When that's complete, all that remains is removing the XP CD from the drive, shutting down the PC, removing the hard drive, placing it back in the laptop, and verifying it'll boot off the hard drive to a command prompt.

If that happens, change to the secondary partition, run smartdrv.exe again and make sure it's functional, then change to the i386 directory, run the winnt.exe file and you should be able to install XP from there.

*phew*

I really hate this process myself. ;)

Good luck...
 
Thanks a lot for the reply. Before I try it, is it possible to update the bios using the hard drive? If I could get the hard drive to act like a floppy I think it could be done.

EDIT: No luck so far.

Is it possible to have boot.ini boot from a CD?
 
Older BIOS updaters typically work directly from floppy because they're coded to use the autoexec.bat file to autoload whatever updater is on the floppy image. It's technically possible to gut that stuff out and boot off the hard drive, get to a command prompt, and then execute the update, yes, but sometimes - depending on the BIOS manufacturer - it can be a complete bitch to make happen.

The boot.ini is a file used to boot 2K/XP/etc; it contains just enough information to tell the bootloader where the OS is installed - that's the primary job of boot.ini. The bootloader then goes off looking for NTLDR and that takes over the boot process.

So... why are you asking about that, is the next question...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top