I have this problem with my XP Pro and Home multi-boot cd. When it runs setup it says "Setup cannot find a previous version of Windows installed on your computer. To continue, Setup needs to verify that you qualify to use this upgrade product."

I just copied the XP files directly off of my working non/upgrade cd, edited the necessary .bin and dat files and now this problem is coming up.

Does anyone have any idea what causes this to happen?

what files did you edit exactly?

I have had exactly the same problem.

It was occuring while making a multi-bootable DVD with the dos makeiso.exe

When i passed about 2.2GB i ran into the same problem.

Turned out to be a bug in the program because when i created the DVD with Nero it worked.

Okay, well, I had it working before when I first started creating this DVD, but that was 8 operating systems ago. Now I have 9 full OSes on this cd.

I have definitely surpassed 2.2gb, but I am creating the ISO in CDIMAGE and testing in Virtual PC. My ROOT folder is 4.40 GB in size, and CDIMAGE creates an iso 2.56 GB in size.

I have only really edited 4 files. xpboot.bin, which became my volume .DAT files in the root of the cd. SETUPLDR.BIN which points to my volumes, and TXTSETUP.SIF which points to my setup folder "\SETUP\WINXPPRO\". I have deleted bootfix.bin. Deleting it (as far as I can tell) just bypasses the "Press any key to boot from cd..." dialog.

Of course i meant CDIMAGE.EXE (v2.47).

It's exactle my problem you descibe. I first thought is was a Virtual PC problem, but on a real pc it didn't work either.

Try it with Nero. Downside is that you need more room on the DVD.

So until someone comes with another solution.....

did you guys use barts multiboot for this or? something else. I think I need to start looking into this as for some reason my automated install no longer gives me the option to recover an existing windows instelation when you get to the hard drive part. So I'm thinking of having a plain vanilla instal on the dvd so if I need to recover and already existing install then I can do that too.

Yeah, I used the methods listed at www.tech-hints.com, which use Bart's loader.bin, deload.bin, diskem1 and diskemu.cmd.

My diskemu.cmd works fine and presents me with all the options, and I have 3 options for XP Pro. I just tried the regular option with no WINNT.SIF and that problem keeps happening.

well there may be an unatended.txt in the i386 also make sure that is not there either. Other than that I would amke sure you get a new set of install files for your i386 off a known working and booting cd. Also one more thing I switched to useing nero a long time ago because of well problems. You may want to go that way also. something is just not right with some of those other tools and things dont work as expected.

How exactly do you make an ISO in Nero 6? I have only been able to make .nrg images, not iso.

The newer Nero versions should allow you to choose ISO from a drop down box where you selected NRG

On a semi-related note, doesn't VirtualPC have issues with DVD images >2GB?

Well my Nero only has .nrg listed in the drop down box, lol. BUT, I was looking online, and I recommend checking out UltraISO. It's like WinISO, but better. It also supports directly burning to Nero through the program. Just click a button and that's all you have to do.

You can check it out here.

Interesting..... I rebuilt my iso in CDIMAGE and decided to give VMware 4.0.5 a try. What do ya know, it works fine now.

By the way, I think VMware 4.0.5 is sooo much nicer than Virtual PC (at least until Virtual PC 2004 is out). It allows you to configure many more options, and now gives me a chance to test out my 2 disk setup, without having to burn a single cd!

well there may be an unatended.txt in the i386 also make sure that is not there either. Other than that I would amke sure you get a new set of install files for your i386 off a known working and booting cd. Also one more thing I switched to useing nero a long time ago because of well problems. You may want to go that way also. something is just not right with some of those other tools and things dont work as expected.

look on the 2nd page of Unattend Secret: Reducing Size.... that method is much much easier

No it's the same in essence. And I figured out what was wrong. It's a problem within Virtual PC 5.2. What exactly, I don't know. But I know that once I switched to VMware 4.0.5 everything has worked flawlessly on test runs.