XP install running off of internal HDD

[cameron84]

Hello all,

I've got quite the conundrum here. I work for a point of sale company that uses computers geared for retail with pre-installed copies of XP. They come to us pre-activated and ready to go. The first time I opened one up, I noticed it came with the XP cd, as the IT tech, I asked myself, "what do I do when I actually need to use this?" These machines don't come with cd or floppy drives...and my boss doesn't want to buy usb sticks because they'd almost certainly get snatched.

So is there a way to boot an XP installation from a secondary partition on the HDD? I have my C drive for my active partition, but I want to setup another partition (and have an option to boot to it, in the boot menu) to do repair-installs or straight installs overwriting the the C drive.

If it's possible on a usb stick, shouldn't it be possible on a logical drive located on the hdd?

This is a real head scratcher for me, I've searched high and low and found pages of ways to do it on usb, but not from a logical drive on the HDD. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Let me elaborate, I want to be able to setup, not actually install, the installation files alongside the real installation, ready to go at a moments notice on another partition.

Edited July 30, 2008 by cameron84

[jaclaz]

It should be possible to use grub4dos mapping to that effect.

Read the grub4dos guide:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showforum=66

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=5187

Peruse the info you can get here:

http://www.msfn.org/board/Install-XP-from-USB-f157.html

Basically you want to re-map your other partition and create the "$WIN_NT$.~BT" folder on your "main" partition.

You could also experiment starting from this approach:

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=5306

jaclaz

[cameron84]

Thanks jaclaz, I'll take a look through this and see what I can do.