Booting from Virtual Drive

[NickCarraway]

Apologies if there is an obvious answer to this.

My disc drive is non-functional, hence I'm trying to boot an nlite Windows XP iso from a virtual drive (a la MagicDisc).

Question is, can the iso (not having setup.exe or autorun.inf) be booted from a virtual drive in some way? Any easy alternatives for booting the iso without a disc drive?

Thanks

[Sp0iLedBrAt]

How about installing from USB? http://www.msfn.org/...ndows-from-usb/ or (more specific) here: http://www.msfn.org/...omusb-with-gui/

Edit: Welcome to MSFN

Edited May 30, 2010 by Sp0iLedBrAt

[NickCarraway]

Thanks for the welcome

My laptop is old unfortunately and does not support booting from USB.

[joakim]

You should be able to boot from a virtual drive, but it must be done in a virtual environment (ie virtualization software installed). Apart from that maybe pxe booting is an option (needs at least one more machine as server).

Do you have a floppy drive?

Joakim

[johnhc]

Apologies if there is an obvious answer to this.

My disc drive is non-functional, hence I'm trying to boot an nlite Windows XP iso from a virtual drive (a la MagicDisc).

Question is, can the iso (not having setup.exe or autorun.inf) be booted from a virtual drive in some way? Any easy alternatives for booting the iso without a disc drive?

Thanks

NickCarraway, I assume by "disc drive" you mean your optical drive. I don't think booting from a virtual drive will do you any good. My suggestion is to take your nLited CD (I assume you have one) to a friends house and copy it on to a USB stick. Do the same for the original Windows CD. Then using a repartitioning program, create a new partition on your HDD large enough to contain a Windows system. I am not familiar with partitioning programs but I think you can find a free one that will move some files around and create a new partition without causing your current installed Windows to fail. Copy the files/folders from the CD to your running partition, not the new one. If your nLite CD really does not have setup and autorun files, then copy those from your original CD (USB copy). Try starting the setup.exe and see if you can install the nLite Windows on the new partition. If this does not work, then try it with the original CD. Good luck and please let us know what you learn. Enjoy, John.

[jaclaz]

My suggestion is to take your nLited CD (I assume you have one) to a friends house and copy it on to a USB stick.

My laptop is old unfortunately and does not support booting from USB.

jaclaz

[johnhc]

My suggestion is to take your nLited CD (I assume you have one) to a friends house and copy it on to a USB stick.

My laptop is old unfortunately and does not support booting from USB.

jaclaz

jaclaz, if you will read my entire reply, you will see I that I did not propose that the USB be booted but copied to his HDD and run from there. Enjoy, John.

[jaclaz]

jaclaz, if you will read my entire reply, you will see I that I did not propose that the USB be booted but copied to his HDD and run from there. Enjoy, John.

Yep , but that assumes that the OS currently on the laptop is working, that a phantomatic free and online partitioning program exists, that the actual running system is Windows (which one?),etc. etc.

The problem is that we miss this info:

• What OS is the laptop running?
  
• Is it currently booting/running?
  
• Can it connect to a LAN?
  
• Is there a floppy disk?
  
• Is the USB functional (even if not bootable from)?
  

The easiest would be if there is some way to copy a few kbytes to the machine AND it is running an OS, to try using PLoP.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=140412

jaclaz