Install XP from hard drive

[johnrobert]

I have an older Toshiba laptop CD drive does not work will not boot from USB, no floppy
I know it’s not worth the effort, but it’s for a kid that has little money.
I hate to say this but I wrecked his other computer, well it was already wrecked but I made worse
I tried putting HD in another laptop install xp then putting HD back it blue screens
I was thinking is there a way of putting install file on HD then putting it back in Toshiba and installing from there I guess I would have to put dos on it to make it bootable
I used to do this all the time with win98.

or any other way of doing it

 

[Cornerstone Technologies]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307848

I used to perform installs like this with NT and 2000. Its pretty easy.

 

[NETWizz]

It would be pretty easy to install it from a memorystick but not as easy as Vista or 7.

You can also image it from disimilar hardware provided you SysPrep first, match the HAL, and have the hard drive storage driver on it... and delete the processor service/device.

 

[johnrobert]

I had an idea to put XP install files on a small D partition fat32
Then in laptop with good cdrom do first part of install just before it boots for second part
Put HD in Toshiba and when it asks for CD navigate to D partition
I think D:\I386
The problem was laptop was getting very hot after being on for a short time so I decided to scrap it.
Many thanks for the help

I guess the easy option would be to pop in another CD-ROM drive but my wife moved all my stuff while I was away and now I don’t know where anything is

 

[ZenTree]

You can also image it from disimilar hardware provided you SysPrep first, match the HAL, and have the hard drive storage driver on it... and delete the processor service/device.

This one is your best bet in future. Or using something like Paragon Adaptive Restore.

 

[kevinjhaag]

I would have just changed the drive temporarily instead of trying all of that. Or if the computer can boot from usb then I would have plugged in my bootable usb flash drive or my usb cdrom drive. But I remember installing windows from a directory on the hard drive back in the day. I think the common name that everyone used for the folder was CABS or something like that.

 

[Vicenarian]

or use a USB DVD drive?

 

[DCGPX]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307848

I used to perform installs like this with NT and 2000. Its pretty easy.

+1 on this method.

I bought a cheap £50 laptop from ebay for my son to do homework on and it came without a working CD, I simply formatted hard drive in a USB dock to Fat 32, copied the i386 folder and transferred Win98SE sys files to it.

Booted up in the laptop, at cmd prompt I started the winnt command and installed from there. Very easy

I also copied smartdrv.exe and ran before starting winnt - It makes a massive difference!