Installing windows off of a Hard drive

mazza7282 · 22 Sep 2006 at 14:12

I'm thinking of building a unit that i will be able to extract windows and software off of, although i want to find a way for me to install windows from a hard drive, not off of the cd.

What type of options would I have ? do i have to make a bootable entry, or something like it so i can type in a command and it will load the excutable file or ?

Becaused to be honest, it will save me lots of time rather than using a CD all the time.

Thanks

wizardmaxx · 22 Sep 2006 at 14:25

Why not make a ghost of your 'Basic' xp installation. Then u can reload windows in less than 5min whenever u want

Carl_Bennetts · 22 Sep 2006 at 14:25

Get your self a copy of Ghost. You can load an image from a external drive well easy!!

Carl_Bennetts · 22 Sep 2006 at 14:25

wizardmaxx said:
Why not make a ghost of your 'Basic' xp installation. Then u can reload windows in less than 5min whenever u want

What he said!

mazza7282 · 22 Sep 2006 at 15:19

What about differences in hardware ? For example a non ACPI system ?

wizardmaxx · 22 Sep 2006 at 15:27

I'm assuming then u want to load xp onto many different machines. :confused:

Gavstar · 22 Sep 2006 at 17:03

You can start the XP installation in DOS, by running winnt.exe from the i386 folder.

Bear in mind that DOS won't read NTFS disks without some fiddling though.

Depending on exactly what you are trying to do, you could copy the windows setup files onto a computer, share them on the network, use a network bootdisk and install over the network.

LACKERKNACKER · 28 Sep 2006 at 20:56

I have been trying to do a simular thing, basics are i have a laptop that for whatever reason won't boot from the cd drive (bios problem) i have been able to get the hard drive to boot with cd drivers loading so i can boot up the laptop and access the cd then - to install xp all i'd have to do is copy the i386 folder to the hard drive and run setup from there??