hairlessAple

I tried everything and winsetupfromusb was the only thing that worked for me too.

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And which was the first? You fixed it how? Was the hard disk UNPARTITIONED/UNFORMATTED? The "cannot read disk" error should be caused by the EXACT opposite of what you report : internal hard disk (unpartitoned/unformatted) having higher priority in boot device that USB stick. The error (on the same machine) should be the same whether you have the USB stick inserted or not. It is also possible that you are falling in one of the reported behaviour in FAQ #10 here: http://home.graffiti.net/jaclaz:graffiti.n...SB/USBfaqs.html (first three points) jaclaz And which was the first? CDROM You fixed it how? I made the USB drive the last device in the boot order. I always make a single partition and format the drive. Anyways, I figured out what I was doing wrong. I now make sure the internal hard drive is higher up the chain in the boot order than the USB drive.

I believe I have found out what the problem was. It was the boot priority. It seems that when the usb has a higher priority than the internal hard drive, i get that error message. Am I on the right track? This is what happened today when I tried installing XP on of our customer's machines. The first run, I didn't bother checking the boot order in the bios...and I got that error message again. So I went into the bios and found out that the usb device was the second device to be booted, and the hard drive was third. I fixed that up, and then it worked fine after that.

ilko...this problem happens randomly with multiple pcs. I can boot from an xp install cd and reinstall the OS on the same computer and everything works okay. So I don't think it's any of the bios or jumper settings. I usually format in NTFS(quick).

I have done couple of installs via my usb drive with no problems. Once in a while though, i get a problem where the computer boots into the deskop the first time and when I install the drivers and such and reboot the computer it gives me a "disk read error occured, press ct+alt+delete". When I boot off my usb drive again and select the second+third step option it boots into the desktop no problem. Would a chkdsk /r fix this? the thing is, whenever I try to do a repair , fixmbr for example, the recovery console always points to the drive other than the main c: drive. The only way to have it see the c: drive is if I run the recovery console via a cdrom...but it still doesn't fix the issue. Well I haven't tried chkdsk /r. I've tried fixboot, fixmbr and bootcfg /rebuild...and none seem to fix the issue. So I end up formatting and redoing the whole thing again and that usually fixes it up but it's a pain in the arse. It looks like such a simple thing to fix, but i have no idea how to do it.

Oh my gawd...it worked great. I'm in debt to you, good sir. And ilko who posted the FAQ.

I was looking for that modded ntdetect file but had no luck, and i don't know how i missed that link the faq. I'll give this a shot. Thank you, Superman!

I've used my usb flash drive prepared by Winsetupfromusb 0.1.1 on bunch of different PCs (mainly HPs) to install Xp SP2 onto with no problems. But whenever I try to install it on Dell pcs...lets say a GX270, it blue screens at the part where the text based install shows you the hard drive / partition screen. Actually it blue screened before I replaced the ntdetect.com from the Windows 2003 which was avialable in some exe file from Microsoft's website...now it just shuts down. So just before the list of hard drives is shown, it shuts down. And this happens on different Dells...it's not just one machine. IDE hard drives by the way...not SATA. I'm at my wits' end here. Help me Superman!