XP install

**Zonie** · November 1st, 2008, 11:30 PM

This may have been covered before, if so, bear with me. I have a clients laptop whose hard drive went bad. After replacing the hard drive, I have the cd which restores the operating system and drivers. I have since discovered there is a problem with the cdrom and it starts hanging during installation saying it cannot read from the cd. I did check the cd in another cdrom on a pc to make sure it was not the cd. No problems. My question is: can you copy the contents from the cd directly to the hard drive and run the setup from there?

I have tried using a standard xp home cd and was told the setup cannot be run from a dos prompt. If there is a way to do this, I would appreciate any help. The client cannot afford a new cdrom for this laptop since they are trying to work and go to medical school at the same time. I am doing this free of charge to them.

**NooNoo** · November 2nd, 2008, 04:55 AM

Originally Posted by Zonie

This may have been covered before, if so, bear with me. I have a clients laptop whose hard drive went bad. After replacing the hard drive, I have the cd which restores the operating system and drivers. I have since discovered there is a problem with the cdrom and it starts hanging during installation saying it cannot read from the cd. I did check the cd in another cdrom on a pc to make sure it was not the cd. No problems. My question is: can you copy the contents from the cd directly to the hard drive and run the setup from there?

I have tried using a standard xp home cd and was told the setup cannot be run from a dos prompt. If there is a way to do this, I would appreciate any help. The client cannot afford a new cdrom for this laptop since they are trying to work and go to medical school at the same time. I am doing this free of charge to them.

Yes you can copy directly to a small formatted partition on the hard drive and then launch the setup from the small partition.

You can copy a few ways - dos network boot or usb stick/usb CD drive boot or remove the hard drive put it in another machine (with the relevant converter) and copy the windows CD to a small partition and make the partition bootable (sys /c).

If you want to ensure that the smaller partition doesn't grab the letter C, then partition and format the rest of the drive, and make the larger partition bootable. Once booted you can change to the smaller partition which will then be D (hopefully).

You then launch the windows install from the small partition. When windows is installed you can then use an external usb drive (although that might be possible anyway depending on the laptop).

**Zonie** · November 3rd, 2008, 10:18 AM

Thanks NooNoo. The laptop is a Gateway model MX6438 with IDE hard drive which had XP Home Ed on it. I had not created a small partition as suggested. I will give this a try, however I am using an XP Home cd I have which contains no key embedded in the cd. The original CD has no setup in it since the previous drive contained a partition for a restore boot apparently. Hopefully this will work. If I have anymore questions will post. Thanks again.