Installing Windows 2000 from USB flash disk?

[tomasz86]

You may also try in advanced options in WinSetupFromUSB to select "Display disk drives on all interfaces, not only USB" and press refresh button.

That was it!

It seems that WinSetupFromUSB can't detect USB flash disks properly under Win2k.

However, there's another problem when loading drivers in the first stage of the text setup:

usbohci.sys could not be found

I searched for it and found this topic. Now, the problem is that my version of Win2k is Advanced Server and what I have in txtsetup.sif is:

[Strings]
srv_id   = "Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server"

Should I change it to

wks_id = "Windows 2000 Professional"

or add it as an additional line? Will it have no negative impact on the system?

Edited October 30, 2011 by tomasz86

[tomasz86]

Finally I've managed to install the system and it turned out to be much simpler than it seemed to be in the beginning.

First of all, I formatted the drive to NTFS using Disk Management. Next I opened WinSetupFromUSB and enabled displaying disk drives in Advanced Options. After that I could select the device I wanted to use. Now I went to txtsetup.sif and added (without changing anything) the wks_id = "Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional" line. Next step was to select the source folder in WinSetupFromUSB and click "GO".

I installed the system on my notebook to test if it works and the installation process went "almost" perfectly. I say almost because there is one problem. There's an update which is run from svcpack and it has one prerequisite - it can be only installed during Windows setup.

[PreRequisite]

Condition = SingleOp, PreReq.SingleOp.InSystemSetup

[PreReq.SingleOp.InSystemSetup]

    EqualOp = CheckReg, HKLM, "SYSTEM\Setup", "SystemSetupInProgress", 0x10001, "==", "1"
    Display_String = "%NOT_IN_SYSTEM_SETUP%"

Now the problem is that it is not installed when using the USB device and there are no problems with it when setup is run from CD or in a VM. To be sure I disabled the condition and it also installed just fine. The other updates which go from svcpack also install without any problems.

What's the difference here? Why is "HKLM\SYSTEM\Setup\SystemSetupInProgress" different when run form USB and when run from a CD or ISO in a VM?

Apart from that everything seems to install perfectly OK.

[giorgoskara]

I suggest you to use WinSetupFrom USB 1.4.I'm now extracting Windows 2000 setup files on my USB Flash Drive!Windows 2000 will also work perfectly with NTFS and will have a faster file trasfer speed.I would recommend you to FORMAT your USB before starting this process on NTFS if having FAT32 or FAT16 or any other filesystem.(FAT32,FAT16 OR other FSs are NOT RECOMMENDED)I would also recommend you to test the USB on QEMU by simply selecting "Test in QEMU" button.

Simply it worked VERY VERY GOOD on my 4GB Silicon Power USB Flash Drive.(4GB and UP is recommended but 2GB will work.)