XP on flash drive??

[runLoganrun]

I searched for this yesterday, ad nauseum, and could not find a solution, tried like several different approaches, "wintoflash", something using Bart'sPE, boot files placed on drive, something else, fat, fat16, fat32, ntfs. nothing worked, when i placed boot.ini, ntdetect, and ntldr on drive, brought me to c prompt, but nowhere else, makeboot was other thing.

if anyone has good solution for this, would be great,
thx,
rlr

 

[Joe Average]

The methodology involved with getting XP to "run" from a USB stick is so complicated it's not worth it. XP was never designed to run from a USB, nor is Vista, nor is Windows 7, or any other version of Windows. Windows 8 has some "portable" mode or version that will address such situations, but it's most likely just a self-contained WinPE setup and still not the full blown top-to-bottom complete OS.

Windows simply isn't designed to be run from external storage of most any kind - the only thing that'll work (and even this isn't 100% perfect either) is an eSATA setup.

You're better off with a simple Linux distro running from a USB stick as a "Live" distro than trying to get XP or any other version of Windows up and running. It's possible to use WinPE and a somewhat functional (seriously) stripped down version of Windows running, but it's still nothing like having a complete Linux distro that's fully functional off the same USB stick.

 

[bigdogchris]

Windows 8 has some "portable" mode or version that will address such situations, but it's most likely just a self-contained WinPE setup and still not the full blown top-to-bottom complete OS.

It does require a 16GB flash drive. Doesn't sound like PE to me, boss.

 

[Sovereign]

What are you needing to do? +1 to Joe for suggesting Linux--I had a laptop hard drive failure wherein I was shipped a new drive to have a tech install rather than having to send the machine in. I used some kind of pendrive-Linux so I could continue using my computer for basic tasks.

 

[runLoganrun]

What are you needing to do? +1 to Joe for suggesting Linux--I had a laptop hard drive failure wherein I was shipped a new drive to have a tech install rather than having to send the machine in. I used some kind of pendrive-Linux so I could continue using my computer for basic tasks.

hey guys, thanks for responses,
The purpose was for a temporary xp install so i could use RSD Lite for Motorola Android phones, Windows 7x64, which is usually what is running has a hard time picking up driver for phone when in bootloader mode. Was able to use it several times succesfully recently, but this time it failed to recognize phone, and basically bricked it, with an rsd lite fail.

I did end up installing xp to an external e-sata drive on other computer, which does have an optical drive, and ran it from there, then rsd lite worked perfectly. I had previously tried with vmware xp install, but when the phone disconnects during flash process, wouldn't get picked up fast enough and would fail.

I also wanted to know if this was possible as I had investigated it before, and wanted to try some of the solutions I had found, so I could use for xp installations on other various machines. Above poster said not possible, but also that not possible for win7 or vista, which is not true, afaik, as that's the way I always install win7 and have no known issues, and used to do vista that way too.

So my immediate issue is dealt with, and I have a way to flash phones better now, works much better on xp. If there is in fact a solution for this, would still be great to know for other purposes.

I was able to make one for windows home server that works great afaik, but can't recall exactly how i did it, i should run search on that. I think is similar file structure, at least more so than 7.

thanks,
rlr