Hey all,

Wonder if you can help me. Ive created an unattended XP CD and would like to install it on to some computers ive made VIA the USB Hard Drive i have, is there a way to do this......?

I want the computers (All support boot from USB ) to boot from the External Drive as if it was booting from the XP CD.

I know how to make a bootable XP CD but not a way to make the USB drive....I making any sense?

So...in a nut shell.......plug in USB HD....Boot from USB....Xp starts the install.

I know that you have to get XP to load Mass Storage Device Drives at some point....but if anyone has seena guide somewhere it would be much appreciated...

Thx All.

You should be able to install it the same way you would install it from a normal hard drive... I believe you would have to run winnt32.exe or winnt.exe at some point...

are u able to go into ur BIOS and say to boot from a hard drive then select the one from the usb. or to make it easier you can burn to info from the usb hard drive to disc.

this might help but im not sure

give it a look

LINK

Thanks all for the info, but im still not sure this is what im looking for....Ripken204 seemed to be closest to what i want but when i go to install using that method it at first run of the GUI setup it errors as WinXP setup cannot read from the drive....

Im sure there should be a way to load Mass Storage Device drivers from the $oems$ path.......im probably really wrong...help me obi wan kenobi...your my only hope..

the only way to install xp from a usb hard drive is that the bios must support that function or feature in your case boot from a usb device or boot from usb

:Bump:

what's there to bump? your bios has to support the feature, then it has to have the boot files on it.

The BIOS does support it as i said in my original post, the question is:

How to make a USB hard drive bootable so it can install xp onto the host machine...

You would need to have it on the Hard disk obviously, and find out what drive letter is assigned to your USB hard disk.

Then get a boot disk, and navigate to your USB hard drive, and then execute winnt.exe in the I386 folder.

IF you bios doesn'T support boot from usb it impossible to do a fresh install. SO stop asking you have been answer before.

He has already said on acouple of occasions, that his bios supports boot from USB

I want the computers (All support boot from USB biggrin.gif ) to boot from the External Drive as if it was booting from the XP CD.

@ Albator: The computers DO support booting from USB, if you took the time to read the post properly before deciding to flame a new member maybe more people would actually sign up to the forum rather than use it as source of information (and a great one at that) and make MSFN even greater.

But still....my question stands.

Would it be possible to clone a Bootable Floppy disk that calls WINNT & the .SIF file from Autoexec.bat and implement that somehow onto the drive?

So you want to install from the EXTERNAL DRIVE, to a static internal drive?

Read my post, just get a boot able floppy and browse to the external drive, locate the winnt.exe and execute it in the i386 folder and follow the instructions.

Floppy boot image:

ftp://ftp.fluidlight.com/pub/nospin_files/wxpboot.exe

hope i don't seem like the 'noob' i am at this forum

but it seems to me that if you did get it working, windows wouldn't be able to install as the usb hd wouldn't be found again until windows has finished installing?

i did get windows xp to install itself before, can't remember i just rea lots of stuff, anyways i had it so you put the hd in and it would install itself, i thought it was pretty neat

praps you could use bart's PE builder to make a bootable portable windows on that drive, have a batch or just manually copy all the files over, then remove the usb drive and let the computer install itself

i suggested the bart pe as that would be able to read ntfs partitions!

this method probably isn't the most conventional, but i'm guessing once its setup probably the simplest to run