wimb

jaclaz wrote: The NTBOOTDD.SYS Miniport Driver is used by the signature(87538753)... entry in the boot.ini file, and they together cause a 20 sec delay before the Windows logo appears. In this case removing the NTBOOTDD.SYS file is fatal: Windows won't start due to disk geometry problem. The signature(87538753) corresponds to the 4 bytes from offsets 1B8h through 1BBh in the MBR, which are called the Windows™ 2000/XP Disk Signature or NT Drive Serial Number. For every install from bootable USB-stick they have the same value, whereas I think that they should change. see: http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/Win2kmbr.htm The second entry of boot.ini beginning with multi(0)... does not make use of the NTBOOTDD.SYS file. Removing the NTBOOTDD.SYS file has in this case no effect. The multi(0)... entry is also the entry normally occurring in boot.ini when installing from CD.

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