Hi all, i've been searching for several days now but i can't seem to find the answer. problem is as follows: i want to make a (hidden) partition which can be booted to to reinstall Windows in classic mode. the behaviour of the setup should be the same as usual during an installation with a unattended cd. i've put an extra disk in my computer and the configuration can be seen as below: HDD1 80 GB | partition 1: 40 Gb | partition 2: 40 Gb HDD2 120 GB | partition 1: 110 Gb | partition 2: 10 Gb on HDD2;part2 i've put all the installation files from the xp cd to test if it even comes with some information i can wrk with but its nothing yet. to get some sort of boot menu i've edited the boot.ini (hdd1;part1 contains already an xp installation) of xp which can be seen below: [boot loader] timeout=10 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /noexecute=alwaysoff multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\I386="Microsoft Windows XP **reinstall**" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect /noexecute=alwaysoff when i boot and select the option 2 (reinstallation) i get the following error: windows couldn't start becausethe following file is missing or corrupt: <windows root>\system32\hal.dll please reinstall a copy of the above file of course, when selecting option 1 Windows will load i want the partition not to contain a ghost file because i'm planning this on multiple machines and i want to be able to reinstall the applications whenever i like from the 'source folder' also, when new drivers are available (e.g, for new hardware) the drivers can be planted right into the partition so it will be installed the next time a reinstallation is needed. i've seen some topics about installing XP from an usb stick so in my eyes this shouldn't be so hard. can somebody help me?