Fritzendugan

well, I eventually gave and borrowed a usb floppy drive (mitsumi). Put the drivers on the disk, then it worked like it's supposed to.... Honestly, my advice to all of you out there trying to do this, it really is worth buying/borrowin/getting(somehow) a usb floppy drive. Way easier, way more efficient (unless of course, you're in some kind of situation where that doesn't work for you either......good luck!). Just make sure you get one that works with the xp install (like I said, mine was mitsumi. BIOS and Windows picked it up no problem. I was using a Toshiba Satellite x205-something....

EDIT: I spoke too soon.... It installed fine, rebooted, try to boot xp, blue screen flashes during the xp logo scrolling loading bar screen.... Any suggestions? When I run in safe mode, and it shows the debug output, I notice that it freezes after "mup.sys" (or dll? can't remember) loads....either mup screws it up, or it's the one after that....

Alright, followed the Original Posters instructions EXACTLY, EXCEPT for the following: Although I used "iastor.sys" (I have an intel controller too) it was a newer version (ICH8-E/M). I have a Flash Drive that acts a Windows 98se Boot disk (there are other tutorials on this site that show how to do that). More on how this helped later. Actually, more on how that helped now! So, after following everything the OP said to do EXCEPT burning the cd. Instead of burning an ISO, I just copied my entire modified XP Setup files (the i386 folder, etc) to the root drive of my flash drive (the boot disk one). Then I restarted my pc, and got my pc to boot up the flash drive boot disk. Next, (into the C:\> prompt) I typed "SMARTDRV.EXE" and pressed enter. Then, (into the C:\> prompt) I typed "i386\winnt.exe" and pressed enter. Windows began the winnt.exe stuff.... NOTE!!!! Some times when doing the various XP install exes, an error will pop up saying "could not find ioStor.sys" (iostor.sys will probably be something different for you. But it's the uncompressed driver file). When this happened, I went back into my working os (vista in this case) and copied ioStor.sys manually to practically any folder it seemed to make sense to copy it to. (i.e. wherever all the other drivers are) after winnt.exe finished (i think i had to go back into vista during this, copy manually, then retry) it restarted, and the textmode install took over. During which I had to do another manual copy of ioStor.sys. I'm still running stuff off the flash drive at this point. After text-mode install finished, I was able to run the setup programs that are now on my sata drive. HOWEVER!!!! I had to edit my boot.ini folder (the one on the sata drive). I changed whatever was there ("multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\windows" i think) to "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows" the "part(1)" may have to change if you have it on partition 2, or partition 3, etc. but the other parts should work. You also have to change the "default=" to the same. Rebooted, booted off the sata drive....got a missing .sys error, went back to vista, copied it into the root drive, "windows\" folder, "windows\system32\" folder, and the "windows\system32\drivers\" folder. I'm sure not all of those are necessary, but did it just to be safe. and after that, it installed fine! Sorry if this may be hard to follow, The whole process took me over 3 days of fiddling around (not these steps, but the numerous attempts I made before this). If anyone could take the time (who knows what they're doing) to tidy this up, and repost, I'm sure people will appreciate it. Feel free to e-mail me, I'll try to help.