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You could try the following. Press f8 when you see starting Windows prompt. Opt for step by step confirmation. Keep a close watch & make a note of thelast driver that gave you the bsd. Boot to dos prompt delete the offending file. You probably have a problem with your partition on the hdd or a misbehaving driver is giving you a problem. Mind you this is a long winded trial & error method. Are you using any multi partition setup for an independent installation on the hdd ? Win98 & ME are probably the easiest ones to install. There is yet another way of doing it. Make a clean install of the windows, either 98 or ME. Boot to safe mode. Delete all the auto recognised hardware from the device manager. This holds true for system devices also. Next boot Norton Ghost & create a ghost file of the C: drive. All you have to do then for your CD is to have a boot option of booting to Ghost & using their scripting & command line switches restore this ghost image to c: drive on the pc in question. The system can then boot, find all the available hardware & install built in windows driver. This way you can also bypass having to feed in the serial number manually.

If you create partitions with any software other than XP installer you will have to reboot because your drive letters will change. There is one way of doing it. It is a bit involved in initial setup but subsequently it can work very quickly. First manually partition & install exactly as you want. Then create compressed ghost images of all the partitions. Then create a win98 boot image that will use gdisk with command line parameters to first delete all the partitions, then create all the partitions & then use ghost with command line parameters to restore all the partitions. Ypu could also let ghost restore all your partitions on a blanked out disk without using gdisk at all. The size of the compressed ghost images will depend on how much data you plan to have on your freshly configured hdd. Please be aware that this can work only on specific machine since the device drivers would be incompatible with any change of hardware. I have also used a method of starting the installation process & stopping when the installation process reboots the system. At that point create a ghost image of the partitially installed c: drive. Boot win98 image from CD , restore this image with ghost on a blank hdd & let it reboot. It should automatically continue from where it left off. Since win98 image also contains jo.sys it will boot from hdd after time out even if your bios is pointing to the cd rom as first boot device. You have to be present only for the very first boot to select the cdrom option where it would wipe out the hard disk & restore the partitions. I have succesfully used this method with all versions of windows.

Only way that I am aware of is if you are using 911CD or any othe multiboot utility using CD-Shell which would permit you to go back to the menu.

The feature of booting iso in BCDW is not so hot. It can boot ISOs of only the boot images. I have tried all sorts of small ISOs. Hiren's CD, Slax Linux, to name a couple. None boot properly which put visible files / folders on the cd when burned. This is a direct quote from Wolfgank Brinkman's BCDW how-to... "If you want to add a program from a bootable CD that resides entirely in the bootsector of the CD (i.e. when creating an Image of the CD, you see no files or folders, but the image size is bigger than zero; e.g. some Acronis Programs), you can simply create an iso image of the CD and copy it anywhere to your BootCD folder." Unless it can mount the ISO as a virtual drive I don't see how it can boot from it

I suggest doing something different. Include cdrom drivers in your dos bootable 1.8" hdd drive so your xp cd is visible from dos prompt. Then simply run winnt32.exe on the xp cd rom from dos prompt. You should now be able to install xp on your laptop hdd. Other method would be to go to the bios settings on your desktop. Temporarily change the settings for your desktop hdd to none. Now the installation cd will not find the original installation on the desktop hdd & should install normally to your laptop drive. Make sure that you do not do a full install but only the basic boot options & copying the files to the hdd, otherwise xp will install all the relevant device drivers for the desktop & you will have a hard time configuring them back to those suitable for your desktop. Hope this helps.

What Dell is most likely doing is just sticking in clone of a premastered HDD suited for your specific hardware & software options. The rate at which they are churning out the boxes would not permit them to customise each individual box, their cost would go up & they would lose their capability to undercut al others.

First of all I thank you jquintin for putting up the iso. I downladed it & found it to be very useful. It is much better than Hiren's boot cd. The files are hosted on rapidshare which does not allow more than a single elment to be downloaded per hour in a single thread only in free mode & there are 9 such 50 mb elements which are required to be downloaded. I found a method to bypass this restriction. After completing download of each segment go to your browser's security options & delete the rapidshare cookie. You will be able to download the next element immediately. This is just to helpout the next guywho wants to download your iso.

Go to Wolfgang Brinkmann's site. He has a how to explaining inclusion of knoppix into bcdw 2.01a.

I worked out a simple solution to this 2 disk floppy boot system. I used the Win98 boot image & simply loaded himem.sys - no emm - + cd drivers in usual manner. Included the dos version of pqmagic directory, including the hidden files, in the root of BCDW cd. Used te findcd.exe to determine the cdrom drive letter & set the environmental variable - cdrom . The last command in my autoexec.bat is %cdrom%\pqmagic\pqmagic.exe. Works like a charm. If you want I can send you the boot image. I have different versions including the dma driver as device driver, TSR & without dma support. Hope this helps.

You could try Virtual Floppy Disk under Win XP. You can mount it & then create a boot floppy from Ghost. It should get written to this virtual floppy. You can then simply save the image & use it as boot image under any cd burning software to get your bootable CD.

Ghost allows you to create a boot disk which will connect to the server. If you have 300 machines - I presume they are identical - why would you want to boot WinPE at all and go trough the hassle of creating fancy scripts? You can simply boot the ghost client cd with dhcp support & specific ndis driver for the network card. You can then restore the images from the server to your heart's content.

There is a Knoppix how-to on Wolfgang Brinkmann's site for your live Linux solution. The trouble I am facing is with W2K. It starts ok but asks for the original Cd of any earlier version of Windows. What I would like to know is the name of the file outside of i386 folder that is required to circumvent this query. When I boot directly from the setuploader.bin it installs fine. I would really appreciate some help on this. Thanks.

You might consider renaming the "Programs" folder & then edit each and every inf file under this renamed folder & change the pointer to teh new name. You should then be able to have 2 versions of Bart-PE on your CD with different menus. I wonder however if the trouble would be worth it. I have several different versions of Bart-PE, each under 200 mb. One for HD problems, one for Virus problem, etc. I burn then on the 8 cm mini CD-RWs which comfortably fit in my shirt pocket.

I have succefully integrated BCDW2 with Bart PE, Winxp-SP2 installation, ERDC 2003 & a whole lot of other floppy boot images like Boot managers, Partition magic 8.05, Norton Ghost & what have you. Only thing I have not been able to manage as yet is putting W2K installation file under NT_1 folder as per the suggestion of Wolfgang Brinkmann. It keeps asking for authentication CD for upgrde version of W2K although it is a full fledged W2K installation version. I found a suggestion by someone who was using a winnt.sif created by nLite but that solution did not work. Perhaps over the weekend I will have sorted out the problem. Then I can have Win98, ME, W2K, XP-SP2, Bart-PE + Hiren's CD in a single DVD.

I use BootIT Ng - Boot & Partition manager. I have Win 95, 98SE, ME, 2k, XP-sp1 & Sp2 running in their own individual partitions. I also have 9 flavours of Linux on the same 120 GB HDD. I have all these without any OS encroching or sharing resources with any other OS. It supports upto 36 primary partitions & 200 OSes if you have the room. Has built in Imaging/Cloning/Manipulating capabilities. It is a shareware worth paying for.