wimb

ilko_t wrote on Apr 22 2007 about SATA problem: In the Help file of the Deployment Tools I saw the following sentence in the description of the Unattended parameter TargetPath: "If you want to specify the target drive, you must use the /tempdrive command-line switch when you run Winnt32.exe and: /tempdrive:drive_letter: Directs Setup to place temporary files on the specified partition. For a new installation, Windows will also be installed on the specified partition. " So I think it might be that using the command: winnt32.exe /makelocalsource /noreboot /tempdrive:C: can help to force Windows Setup to use the C-drive of your SATA harddisk. I have no SATA drive, so I cannot test the idea ....

Thanks a lot to porear and jaclaz, ilko_t and cdob The method that ilko_t described for installing Windows XP from a bootable USB-stick works perfect ! I have used an Apacer HT203 1GB USB-stick and Windows Setup on my laptop took only about 30 minutes ! The GRUB4DOS grldr was complaining about the CHS values of the USB-stick obtained from my BIOS, but the warning was no problem for beginning Windows Setup. There were some small differences with the normal setup from CD. I obtained an extra file NTBOOTDD.SYS in the root of my C-drive, which is an ATAPI IDE Miniport Driver. Also in the boot.ini file there was an extra entry beginning with signature(87538753) , although UseSignatures="no" was used in the winnt.sif file. The entry was marked as the default entry and slows down the booting of the computer by 20 sec. Replacing signature(87538753)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS by default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS in the boot.ini file and removing the second entry, solved the problem and now the computer is booting as fast as normally I understand that the procedure is not yet applicable to SATA harddisks, but for the many people that use PATA harddisks, it is already an excellent solution