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Installation Errors With Nlite Winxp Cd


sfetaz

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Windows XP setup cannot format more than one drive at a time from what I understand. What I did to fix this was choose my D drive for installation, had setup quick format it to NTFS, then when the file copy process started, turned off my PC. Then I went into setup again and chose C drive for installation.

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No software is going to be able to do something beyond what windows can do, within windows. Therefore, Nuhi cannot make Nlite format a drive for you during setup unless windows allowed it to happen which it does not. You should format the drive yourself before installing Windows.

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  • 7 months later...

Thanks for the MS Knowledgebase article on this sfetaz. I had the same exact problem today and had no idea until I checked this thread out.

Yes, it's too bad there is no option in Legacy Windows setups to format more than one drive. Nice to see Windows Vista setup can do this.

I managed to format the partitions using UBCD's Paragon Partition Manager. It has a GUI and from what I see, it loads under Windows 3.1 RAM enviroment.

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I'm going to share my experience here as well just so people with this problem can find as much info in one place as possible.

My Intent:

Install nLite on my PC with two hard drives. Windows and Documents and Settings in each of their own partions on drive 1, and Programs in their own partition on drive 2. Drive 1 currently had Win 98 on it, and drive 2 had a copy of XP.

How It Went Down:

I nLited my disk with Programs on H:\ and Docs on I:\ I started up the installer which recognized drive 1 as C:\ and drive 2 as D:\. My two cd-roms were recognized as E:\ and F:\, so I formated G:\ (for Games) H:\ and I:\ and started the install. Yes I didn't format any of those partitions, but when I was troubleshooting I discovered this wasn't the cause of my trouble.

The Problem:

As soon as the computer restarts and begins installation, those partitions I made that were G:\ H:\ and I:\, got re-recognized as F:\ G:\ and E:\ respectively, and the cd-roms got recognized as H:\ and I:\. no matter what I called things in the initial format stage of the installation things got reordered based upon first partition on master HD, first partition on slave drive, remaining partitions on master drive, then remaining partitons on the slave, and then the cd-roms.

In order to anticipate this best, I installed a full install of XP on my future C:\ and used the Disk Management to partiton and format the drives. I then went and created a new nLite Disk anticipating E:\ for my Docs and H:\ for my programs (I left a small F:\ for future use.) Then I installed the nLited disk over the full XP install I had just done.

Everything worked fine.

The Moral:

Changing file paths on partitions, especially using more than one drive, is tricky. The errors at the start of this thread can indicate you did something wrong when specifying their path or their formatting.

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Just use C:\Users, or C:\Documents and Settings,

then after install, copy all the files from there to D:\ (can't copy all files of the logged in user, will need to logout once, to second Admin)

and mount D: to C:\Users ;)

Same thing for Program Files or the like, Set Nlite to C:\Programs

copy all files to E:\, and mount the drive to C:\Programs

Does require a minimal amount of work after install, but sounds better than multiple setups to format drives...

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  • 1 year later...

I had a similar problem with nLite install to a partitioned RAID mirror installation with nVidia drivers...

Installation would dump with same error message...(I was trying to direct "Docs and Settings" to one of the partitions)

Basically I worked around by booting XP from an alternate HD, formatting the two non boot partitions on the RAID array, and then restarting the install.

Once the partitioned drives were formatted, install from nLite ISO went fine.

(Previously, I guess that even though the Win setup assigned drive letters to the partitions, the partitions could not be recognized, (D: and E:) so setup was trying to write to "F:" drive which was the CD drive.

Thanks for your work...will donate $$ to nLite. (When I first read about slipstream installs w/ nLITW, I was nervous because was new to me...With a little research, I got it going, worked great. Neat Ap!!!)

. Also, thanks for the message board which is a great resource.

:D

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  • 1 year later...
Windows XP setup cannot format more than one drive at a time from what I understand. What I did to fix this was choose my D drive for installation, had setup quick format it to NTFS, then when the file copy process started, turned off my PC. Then I went into setup again and chose C drive for installation.

Ahaha that's funny :thumbup .. Interrupting the setup process just to have D: formatted. I recently had this problem this weekend. And now I know what's causing it.

My two cents, if you do not want to interrupt setup:

1. I assume you want to use C: for Windows and D: for your data.

2. After partitioning your hard drive, this leaves all your partitions unformatted.

3. Using the original XP CD, install Windows into C: and actually finish the whole process.

4. Then when you can actually get into Windows, format D: using Explorer.

5. This time, using your nLite XP CD (which sets ProfilesDir = D:\Documents and Settings), reinstall Windows into C:. Drive D: will have been already formatted, so Setup shouldn't have problems writing to D: for your Profile folders.

I'm quite confident that this works. It's what I'll be doing next time I'm doing general cleaning for my PC :sneaky:

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jaclaz,

Thanks for the tip :lol: Well, I actually took note of the posting dates.

But, considering that this thread scored quite high on my Google search, I bet someone else out there could use some help, like I did.

Just paying it forward.. hehehe.. ;)

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