[Question] Installing win xp from an external hard drive

[Goldbroad]

hi

I have an laptop Compaq 1200 but my cd rom doesn´t work but i have an external hard drive but i dont know how to install win xp from there. can anyone help me out?

Title edited -- Please, use [TAGS] in your topic's title.

--Sonic

[net_user]

do you have the cd copied to the external hard drive?

[Sonic]

It's same as installing from an usb drive. Windows XP setup will reset usb function during the setup so installation can't continue ... but I havn't search if a new method is available.

[LLXX]

Boot from the external hard drive, preferably to a command prompt. Format your main drive if needed. Copy the entire I386 directory to your main drive and SYS it so that it will boot to a command prompt as well. Disconnect the external hard drive and allow it to boot from the main drive to a command prompt. Run WINNT.EXE in the I386 directory and your installation will continue as normal.

Edited May 18, 2006 by LLXX

[Goldbroad]

Boot from the external hard drive, preferably to a command prompt. Format your main drive if needed. Copy the entire I386 directory to your main drive and SYS it so that it will boot to a command prompt as well. Disconnect the external hard drive and allow it to boot from the main drive to a command prompt. Run WINNT.EXE in the I386 directory and your installation will continue as normal.

ok, but i cant copy i386 im not allowed to do that with copy.exe

yes i have copied the cd to the external hard drive but dont know how to boot. because the laptop its a bit old and dont boot from usb

i have also a external usb iomega CDRW55292EXT but in dos i cant find it.

[IcemanND]

you could try booting from floppy if you have one, then use ghost (or similar program) to clone the usb drive over the new drive, the reboot from floppy and run winnt.exe from the internal drive.

[Goldbroad]

can you explain better?

[IcemanND]

copy the i386 directory to your external hard drive (needs to be formatted fat32).

Back up any data on the internal drive.

Get / create a bootable dos floppy, or if you have Norton Ghost or similar application use it to create a boot floppy.

Image the external drive to the internal drive.

restart and boot from floppy again.

run i386\winnt.exe <your switches> to install XP.

convert drive from fat32 to ntfs.

[Goldbroad]

ive done that but now i cant find the external drive by usb

[Sonic]

Because you use NTFS filesystem on your usb disc like IcemanND said. DOS environment can't read NTFS natively ...

[IcemanND]

at what point is the usb hard drive not seen?

Ghost 9 will normally see a usb hard drive. If not you may need to add a switch for it to try and detect it differently.

[Goldbroad]

i have run winnt.exe but when doing the configuration the setup cant find the files nedeed. like ntldr some files with sys extension.

maybe i've copy the i386 wrong. because i find out that when i copy the i386 from external hdd to my fix drive the subfolders wasnt copyed. i dont know why. is there any dos command to do that?»

[LLXX]

Use xcopy command,

xcopy d:\i386 c:\i386 /s /e /h