XP install w/o a CD drive? -- Solved
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Pick up a USB floppy drive, and then hope the machine can boot from it? Once the machine is in a bootable state, format the hard drive, and copy the install files from a USB stick to the hard drive.
--Mike--
That was my first thought, but it's on his list, he says he'll need USB drivers.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Please read this[^] if you don't like the answer I gave to your question. "! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
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I guess you won't have network support either, to install from a network ? I think that installing an OS onto the HDD and then running from there is a great idea. why can't you just remove and update the video drivers after installing ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Please read this[^] if you don't like the answer I gave to your question. "! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
Christian Graus wrote:
why can't you just remove and update the video drivers after installing ?
That was the original plan, but the screen is blank; just a non-responsive cursor even in safe mode. I am not positive it is actually completing the start up. It maybe hanging before it finishes. Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
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Christian Graus wrote:
why can't you just remove and update the video drivers after installing ?
That was the original plan, but the screen is blank; just a non-responsive cursor even in safe mode. I am not positive it is actually completing the start up. It maybe hanging before it finishes. Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
What if you use the installed XP to boot the computer, but into safe mode, and then see if it installs drives to read XP to install from a USB ? Or have it repair itself from the USB ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Please read this[^] if you don't like the answer I gave to your question. "! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
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What if you use the installed XP to boot the computer, but into safe mode, and then see if it installs drives to read XP to install from a USB ? Or have it repair itself from the USB ?
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Please read this[^] if you don't like the answer I gave to your question. "! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
Christian Graus wrote:
into safe mode
That's what I was trying to do - even in safe mode the screen is blank. It at least lets me get to the boot menu, so it must be reading the HDD. But after the list of drivers scrolls by it hangs. I am trying to format a floppy - had to go to the garage and root around to find a drive and then go borrow some disks. Who ever uses floppies any more!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
There is a boot disk on http://bootdisk.com/[^] that may work for you. http://bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm[^] The custom fresh install bootdisk's readme says that you can copy the XP installation to a folder on the hard disk, boot from this floppy and install XP. Can you copy files onto the hard disk, from another PC? I've done the same a long time ago, but I had a windows 98 CD at that time * Used a DOS floppy to boot the PC. The floppy has DOS network drivers, which allow accesing shared folders on another PC * Copied the windows 98 installation to the hard disk * Installed windows 98 * Copied windows 2000 (XP wasn't out at the time) installation to the hard disk & ran the setup from windows 98 (I later discovered that 2000 allows you to create a set of startup floppies, to start the setup without booting from the CD) In your case, you could try to access a shared drive as in step 1, but not all network adapters allow this. I used the mslanman drivers available at the time, but have no idea whether this is still possible. Hope it helps...
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There is a boot disk on http://bootdisk.com/[^] that may work for you. http://bootdisk.com/popfiles.htm[^] The custom fresh install bootdisk's readme says that you can copy the XP installation to a folder on the hard disk, boot from this floppy and install XP. Can you copy files onto the hard disk, from another PC? I've done the same a long time ago, but I had a windows 98 CD at that time * Used a DOS floppy to boot the PC. The floppy has DOS network drivers, which allow accesing shared folders on another PC * Copied the windows 98 installation to the hard disk * Installed windows 98 * Copied windows 2000 (XP wasn't out at the time) installation to the hard disk & ran the setup from windows 98 (I later discovered that 2000 allows you to create a set of startup floppies, to start the setup without booting from the CD) In your case, you could try to access a shared drive as in step 1, but not all network adapters allow this. I used the mslanman drivers available at the time, but have no idea whether this is still possible. Hope it helps...
Oh, that's an *awesome* idea. Format the HDD, put XP installer on it, and then you just need a way to boot.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Please read this[^] if you don't like the answer I gave to your question. "! i don't exactly like or do programming and it only gives me a headache." - spotted in VB forums.
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
Install DOS with floppies. Install Windows 3.1 on that. Upgrade Windows 3.1 with 95. Upgrade that with 98. Then upgrade to XP. Make sure you buy a license for each copy of Windows.
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Install DOS with floppies. Install Windows 3.1 on that. Upgrade Windows 3.1 with 95. Upgrade that with 98. Then upgrade to XP. Make sure you buy a license for each copy of Windows.
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
I've never used it, but... what about BartPE or similar software... if I got it correctly some time ago those software are used to solve this kind of things... Hope this helps... And good luck! :rose:
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
I remember having to do this with my PC's years ago before I had ones with bootable CD drives. I used to make a boot disk. copy the CD drivers and a program called MSCDEX[^] onto the disk. Boot from the floppy. Run MSCDEX and point it at the driver .sys file. Then you can access the windows CD and run the setup program. You can probably download boot disks that include cd drivers from somewhere. Other people have mentioned some sites that look like they might have what you are looking for.
Simon
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
I take it you have thought about using a network boot disk to set the install from an RIS server? Is the laptop new enough to allow you to network boot from the bios? Obtain the official oem discs for the laptop from the manufacturer and then try to create the image for network rollout. (Possibly use Ghost and a VM to generate the installation image.)
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
Does the child need windows? Debian will do a network install from a floppy disk http://linux.simple.be/debian/etch/floppy[^]
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Christian Graus wrote:
into safe mode
That's what I was trying to do - even in safe mode the screen is blank. It at least lets me get to the boot menu, so it must be reading the HDD. But after the list of drivers scrolls by it hangs. I am trying to format a floppy - had to go to the garage and root around to find a drive and then go borrow some disks. Who ever uses floppies any more!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
Stupid question. Did you try "safe mode with command line" and then running setup from the command line? And what options are in the bios for booting on the machine?
_____________________________ Those who study history are doomed to watch others repeat it. -Scott M.
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
Snowman58 wrote:
How did you solve the no CD issue?
Can you get a CD drive that connects via USB? What about copying (not installing) the WinXP CD to some temp folder on the laptop's HDD, boot with a floppy, and then installing from the HDD's temp folder?
"Old age is like a bank account. You withdraw later in life what you have deposited along the way." - Unknown
"Fireproof doesn't mean the fire will never come. It means when the fire comes that you will be able to withstand it." - Michael Simmons
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Here is the solution I found: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/[^] A little complicated, but not bad. Worked great, installation was faster than from a CD! Thanks for all the suggestions. Original Post: I was asked to help a friend who was given an old laptop for thier kid. It's not great, but more than the kid can use today. But the HDD was wiped by the last owner so it needs XP installed. However, it only has a floppy, no CD. (the removable CD was apparently either lost or broken) It has USB, but will not boot from USB. First thought was to pull a CD from one of the four laptops around here and plug it into the old laptop. Nope, none of the connectors would mix and match. Second thought was to pull the HDD, put it in my laptop, format & install XP. Almost worked, it at least sees an OS, but the video is totally hosed even in safe mode. (it was setup for 800 x 600, generic XVGA). The screen works fine in BIOS, so it apparently wants its own drivers. The question at hand is how to do an XP install on a machine that does not have a CD? Options I see to try: 1) Create a boot floppy with USB drivers and try to do an install from the USB. 2) Use my other laptop to create a bootable dos partition on the HDD and try to do the install from it. Anyone managed to do this before? How did you solve the no CD issue? Other Suggestions? (Besides kicking myself for undertaking this little favor.) Thanks!
Melting Away www.deals-house.com www.innovative--concepts.com
Thanks for all the suggestions Status: Booted with DOS disk created from XP It could not see the ntfs C drive, OK a DOS disk created under NTFS can't see NTFS. Thanks MS. Booted from a floppy with DOS ntfs support. It can see the c drive and the setup files I copied there. Setup will not run from DOS, so went to i386 and tried winnt A dir stops listing files in the r's. Apparently there is a limitation on the number of files it can see in any directory. I upped the files command in config.sys It still can't find the winnt files (I checked, it's there) Booted from a floppy with both NTFS and network support Mapped a networked CD - great, I can see the install files! Tried to run winnt from mapped drive; Strange it can see winnt on the mapped drive, but not the HDD. Yes its there. Get an error message "Setup is out of memory, can't continue" Apparently needs a driver for the swapfile - more research ahead. Have not found a DOS USB driver that works. (or the USB port does not work) Boot from network not supported, choices are: Floppy, HDD, CD - (which is missing). Might try a Linux boot disk and see if it can run the install from the HDD.