• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Installing XP w/o CD or USB?

D

DrNic2032

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 5, 2007
Messages
125
I am trying to install XP onto an older laptop for a small side project. Unfortunately the CD drive on the machine is dead and the machine doesn't have bootable USB support.

In order to install the OS I was thinking about pulling out the hard disk and putting it into an external enclosure, then using another machine I would format it and setup two partitions. The small partition I would make bootable then xcopy the XP install CD onto. From there I would put the drive back into the laptop, boot onto the small partition, and install the OS onto the larger one.

Does this sound like it would work? I wanted to ask around before I got to far into this if there was maybe an easier way to go about doing this.

Thanks for any help/advice!
 
The easiest way is to put the HD in another machine, boot from an XP isntall CD, run through the install to the point where the disk is formatted and the files are copied to it. At that point, when it performs the reboot after which it would actually start to install, power off the machine.

Move the HD back into the orginal machine and power back on to complete the install. This will work, unless you have to supply drivers to see the first machines HD.
 
nessus said:
This will work, unless you have to supply drivers to see the first machines HD.
Click to expand...

Even if you run into that little problem, you can still integrate drivers (i.e. SATA) into the XP install disc with some tools like nlite.
 
IIRC you can also set up the HDD with a bootable dos (use the version from win98) and copy the XP setup files to it, then run setup from dos.

This may be the easiest way if you have a win98 box handy to do the formatting with copy of system files on.
 
plugwash said:
IIRC you can also set up the HDD with a bootable dos (use the version from win98) and copy the XP setup files to it, then run setup from dos.

This may be the easiest way if you have a win98 box handy to do the formatting with copy of system files on.
Click to expand...

This is pretty much exactly what I was planning to do. However I ran into a few problems.

I pulled the drive, made the partitions and copied over the files. Unfortunatly I only have access to Vista/Win7 machines and thus far have been unable to 'easily' make a boot partition on the drive. The old 'format as a boot disk' and sys from command line tricks apparently no longer work.

Any thoughts on a quick way to make the partition bootable?

Also, I can't swap this drive into any of my newer laptops due to ATA vs SATA incompatibility between the machines in question.
 
use Novicorp win2flash, its a tool to copy xp so it can be installed on a usb key, but you can use it to copy xp to your laptop hard drive.

create a 1 gb partition and let win2flash copy xp on it. Once it boots you can install on a secondary partition.

Unfortunately the default drive won't be C:, but that shouldn't be an issue.
 
DrNic2032 said:
Any thoughts on a quick way to make the partition bootable?
Click to expand...
IF you have a win98 CD you should be able to setup a virtualbox vm with the hard drive in question mapped into it then boot the vm off the win98 CD and format the hard drive with system files copied.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top