cham88

Thanks man, I'll check it out after I put this Antec 300 build together.

Well I believe that is beyond my expertise so I will take the easier way out and temporarily snag an optical drive from another PC to install windows. I have only a PATA HDD but I can temporarily use either a SATA or PATA optical drive. I want to install xp with ACHI enabled in the BIOS since I will eventually have a SATA HDD and i found out the hard way that to enable ACHI requires a complete new xp install. choices: 1. Sata optical, nlite SATA drivers. (i think i tried this before and it failed) 2 PATA optical on same IDE as HDD (only one IDE header),HDD master, optical slave, nlite install what to do, what to do...

thanks, looks like it is more complicated

i see alot of complicated ways to install xp from a usb thru google. Why can't i just slipstream sp3 onto sp2 xp, tell nlite to make it bootable, burn to cd, copy files from cd to usb drive. set to boot from usb in bios, install xp. will this not work? thanks