How to get XP installed?

**Grrrmachine** · 10-30-2005, 04:11 AM

Right, here's my dilemma.

I have a laptop HDD that Im trying to get XP installed onto. I have all the XP files as an .iso on my main PC, which I can open and extract, BUT, I cant actually get XP to install on the second drive.
The problem here is that I cant make the second drive bootable - I need to get some kind of boot command onto the drive so that I can run the install sequence from there. This SHOULD be easy, BUT
a) I dont have a floppy drive, so I cant make a boot floppy
b) I dont have the original XP CD (thats at my house in the UK, 1000 miles away)
c) I dont have a CD-R drive to make a bootable CD.

So how the hell do I get XP installed onto this little drive? I know I can copy NTLDR onto the drive and use a boot.ini, but then the drive needs XP already installed...

**lez** · 10-30-2005, 06:14 AM

usb / memory stick type thing?

**DarquePervert** · 10-30-2005, 06:25 AM

Useless is he can't boot to the HDD to be able to read the USB thingie.

**Grrrmachine** · 10-30-2005, 06:26 AM

Something like that - it's in a USB caddy at the moment, connected to my main PC, but it'll be running on IDE on the CarPC.

I just want to do the old dos thingy - "sys c:" but you cant fscking do that in XP any more, and I dont have a floppy or CD I can boot the PC with to start the install

**DarquePervert** · 10-30-2005, 06:37 AM

See, you ruled out all my suggestions...
Perhaps you could convince someone to ship you the CD, or wait until you get home....

**Grrrmachine** · 10-30-2005, 06:42 AM

well, all my gears in storage, and probably will be until 2011

I could just buy a CDRW drive, but I wanted to get this install done this weekend (Im off work till Wednesday)

I was following a giude about making a USB drive bootable by playing around with NTLDR and boot.ini - any way of using this to go straight to the WINNT installer in the I386 folder?

Another option is to find a bootdisk maker that will accept the second hard drive as a floppy drive so I can copy a system file to it, but I cant find anything like that...

Bloody Microsoft. They think they're making our lives EASIER....

**reiner15** · 10-30-2005, 06:42 AM

if you could connect to a network that would be one way...

**Grrrmachine** · 10-30-2005, 06:49 AM

How would that help? I just need a way of getting a system file onto a hard drive without a floppy or CD drive. The hard drive is the slave in a machine already.

**rebelleader** · 10-30-2005, 07:57 AM

Well as long as you have the ability to take the HD out if the laptop you could Ghost your PC windows install onto your laptop HD. Kind of a messy solution, but without a Burner you are kind of stuck.

**lez** · 10-30-2005, 08:25 AM

Originally Posted by DarquePervert

Useless is he can't boot to the HDD to be able to read the USB thingie.

You dont need to boot off a hd to read a usb thingy, I can boot off my friends usb keyring, can even do an install of xp onto it and run the machine with no hd at all.

I was going to do that for the car pc but it wears out the memory stick app.

(of course old machines cant do this, but modern-ish laptops can)