chimera15

It was partition magic! I now have an ntfs windows pro install on this system, hurray! System fixed. <beam>

So I finally figured out I just wasn't giving the system time to install, I let it run for like 30 minutes and it finally came through. I was able to install xp pro on it, but it's on a fat32 drive, which is pretty bad, and one of the things I had planned was to put Vista on this system, which won't work since it only can be done on a ntfs system. Anyone know a program that will convert a drive to ntfs? I think I remeber paragon or a program that will do it out there without having to refomat the drive and without effecting windows?

Hmm I pulled the boot disk tried to boot from the hd to see what it'd do and it pushed me through to the installation and repair console. So may have solved this one! Thanks!

Hmm thanks for your help. I'll look those over. I managed to put the freedos usb drivers that worked onto a windows 98 boot disk, rewrote the config.sys and autoexec.bat files, and it fired up and recognized the cdrom and everything, but still no go. Even with smartdrive and a ramdisk the windows install still didn't see the ntfs drive during the preinstall and faulted out. It said it needed a drive at least 500 mb in size and exited. I ended up reformatting the hard drive using fdisk from the boot disk, and then tried to do the install with the now recognized cdrom drive, which fired up, ad began copying files, however now it's frozen on that part, directly after it copies the ntfs files to the c drive. I've tried windows xp pro and home cd's and they both do the same thing.<sigh> So there's still something funky and wrong with the way I'm going about it. Any ideas on that issue? I guess I'll look at the boot disks you mentioned...maybe a different driver for my cd will get it to work.

Well I made some headway and realized the freedos disk will also recognize external hard drives, and got the windows xp install to start using an external hard drive for the swp file, but it got stuck on "Reading inf file dosnet.inf"... Maybe this is because I'm using freedos to boot from...? Any chance anyone knows how to get around something like that in the pre install?

I've got a problem I've run across before, but I thought I'd see if anyone here had any helpful tools or might know where to get something that would work. I have an old laptop that I'm trying install xp on. The main problem being is that it doesn't have a cd rom drive. I have a usb cd drive that's working with freedos, however the hard drive I'm trying to use is an ntfs formated drive, so when I try to run the xp setup, I get "windows can not find a place to put the swap file and must exit" or something similar. If I could get a ramdrive up, would it then allow the swp file to work? That's I guess my next step. Does anyone know a for sure way to conquer this one? Maybe a boot disk that would assign an ntfs drive a letter and let it be seen? Anyway, Thanks!

Just signed up to say thanks for this. I've searched for weeks for a driver or a way to get my keyboard to work, when the standard installation didn't do anything(Couldn't find the standard keyboard device driver). This totally worked! Thanks so much!