Installing windows off a flash drive - help please.

Mr_White

Mr_White

Mr_White

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Hi folks.

Well I've been given the task of fixing a relatives laptop, it's completely screwed over with viruses and is running slower than a Cyrix MII on 16mb of ram.

No problems, just format it and resinstall windows, however, the cd drive is broken, it doesn't do anything, it'll eject, and that's it, it won't spin up, the laser doesn't move, you can't boot anything off it.

So I need to install windows off a flash drive so I can get it working, then he can use an external CD drive or we can worry about replacing the old one.

So what would I need to do this? I've been out of the loop, I used to constantly be fixing computers, but I got sick of it, so I've forgotten some of the stuff I used to know, so any advice would be greatly appreciated, as I need to ideally get this done by tonight or tomorrow, much thanks.


Edit: I've just been informed that you can't install windows off a flash drive, I was sure you could for some reason :(

Is there any other way to boot and install windows without a cd drive?
 
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I really wanted to do it tonight without having to go and buy anything, it doesn't look like it's going to be that straight forwards though.

I'm hoping I can fix the CD drive.
 
Mr_White said:
I really wanted to do it tonight without having to go and buy anything, it doesn't look like it's going to be that straight forwards though.

I'm hoping I can fix the CD drive.
Click to expand...

Don't you have a spare CD/DVD drive? or 1 you could borrow off somebody?

Andr3w1984
 
Only full sized ones unfortunately.

I've got some life into the CD drive now, it's doing a few seeks then stopping, but it's something at least :p
 
map a network drive using winPE and do a network install of xp from within WinPE.

As winPE and bartPE will boot from USB stick
 
Mr_White said:
Hi folks.
Edit: I've just been informed that you can't install windows off a flash drive, I was sure you could for some reason :(
Click to expand...

Not so.

Use - http://petousb.en.softonic.com/ to format the USB stick.
Copy the entire contents of the Windows XP CD to the newly formatted USB stick.
Set your BIOS to boot from the USB stick.
Install Windows.
Remember to alter the BIOS back to hard drive boot after the first setup Windows setup reboot.

I did exactly this just yesterday.
If it doesn't work, post back here, I'll have missed a step in the instructions.
 
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You could always just create an image of the XP Disk and then image a USB stick??? Not sure if this would work or bork the USB Stick.
 
ns400r said:
Not so.

Use - http://petousb.en.softonic.com/ to format the USB stick.
Copy the entire contents of the Windows XP CD to the newly formatted USB stick.
Set your BIOS to boot from the USB stick.
Install Windows.
Remember to alter the BIOS back to hard drive boot after the first setup Windows setup reboot.

I did exactly this just yesterday.
If it doesn't work, post back here, I'll have missed a step in the instructions.
Click to expand...

The entire contents from browsing the CD or a copy from command prompt?

Cheers, looks like a bit of light at the end of the tunnel ;)
 
Copy every file and folder by which ever means you usually use.
I used Explorer and just copied and pasted the files. It's slow writing that much to a USB stick though.

And from memory, you'll also need some files from the root of a working C drive in Windows XP. NTDETECT.COM , ntldr and maybe boot.ini I think. I'll confirm those in a bit.
 
Cheers, I'm just copying the XP cd using command prompt.

Is there any specific drive label or settings I should format the drive with?

Thanks for the help
 
Just done this again here.
Stick boots but errors because the boot files refer to the hard drive and that is wrong.

If you have a system with a floppy drive then you can format the stick and copy the DOS boos files from a disk to it. Then boot from the stick to a DOS propmt and then run winnt.exe from the i386 folder on the stick to install Windows. Can't remember how I did it yesterday but it was working but I didn't pay enough attention as to what I used for boot files on the stick to autorun the Windows setup, sorry.
 
Apparently Vista has the feature to install off a flashdrive/hard drive on boot, is this correct?

I could always do that I guess.

Edit: Nevermind, I can't do that :p
 
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