Has anyone installed Windows XP by copying the i386 folder to the hard drive?

I am having difficulty installing Windows XP on an older system that does not want to boot from a CD, even though the BIOS has settings indicating it supports booting from CD. I tried the 6 floppy XP boot set & had errors, then I copied the i386 folder to the freshly FAT32 formatted hard drive & ran winnt.exe like you can do in Windows 2000. I got an error "Setup was unable to copy the following file..."

Have any of you successfully installed Windows XP from the i386 folder on the hard drive?

I would be interested in links to tutorials on the Internet as well. I have Googled, but not found any so far.

Thanks!

Dave

Have you run a check on the ram?

No, but I did switch the RAM for other RAM to test.

What do you use to test RAM?

hmmm...

Someone else posted a link here once on how to make a bootable XP-SP1 CD

Now you can drop the Service Pack 1 stuff if you so desire and if you look at the process, it seems as though you have the whole CD on the harddrive and all you would need is to copy the XP folder to the hdd, boot with a win 9x boot floppy and run setup from the c:\xp\cd-root directory.

I haven't tried it myself, I've made a bootable CD, I have the files that were burned on my hdd, and I can run setup from a dos prompt, so I say go for it :D

I have also created a bootable CD with sp1 slipstreamed.

In this case, I copied the entire i386 folder from the CD to the hard drive (over 5000 files!)

You can't run "setup.exe" from a command prompt as it's a Win32 application meant to be run from within Windows. You can however run "winnt.exe" from the DOS prompt to install the OS. I have done this sucessfully with Windows 2000, but I am running into trouble with XP.

Well, I solved one problem; the reason I was getting the error "The following value in the .sif file used by Setup is corrupt or missing..."

Was that there is a problem wih the XP CD I created with sp1 slipstreamed. I went back to the original CD & it installed fine using the 6 floppy XP Installation set.

I was unable to install from the hard drive. That problem may have been the CD as well, since the i386 folder I copied to the hard drive was from the modified CD. When I have time, I will try the hard drive install again.

I am very interested in this topic. I have recently tried to install from Hard Drive and haven't had any luck.

If you get it to work or find a solution please post it.

I am also very interested in this. I am monitoring the thread.

I suspect that the problems I have had related to the XP CD I was using. I think if I use my original XP Pro CD it should work. I posted in another forum & received information indicating that this is very possible. In fact one guy had installed it successfully on 6 systems that way.

The key is to run "Winnt.exe", NOT "setup.exe" & to have "smartdrv.exe" running. I also have "himem.sys" running.

I am building a system this weekend, so I will try this again. :)

In the NT4 days, didn't you have to type in c:\i386\winnt.exe /s:c:\i386.....

I don't remember the specifics. In school, we did a lot of NT4 installs from the HDD. When you only had the 120 timebomb NT training CDs you will try anthing. Then we could get WinNT, Win3.x and Win95 all on the same box, even going to a Novell server. Those were the days! Of course knowing M$, DOS commands will not be supported anymore soon! I wonder if using the /? options from NT4 setup would work....? Mmmmmm.

to install xp from hd copy the i386 folder from xp cd to hard drive (eg on D: not on C: where U R going to install windows).open winnt32.exe or if U R installing in dos use winnt.exe,for this use 98 bootable cd.XP will install in less time than as from xp cd.BUT the problem is this that i often use internet and my hard drive xp instalation sometimes corrupts i.e there is dll missing error during xp setup.IF U have some solution for this please email me . THANKS!

Welcome to Windrivers Muhammad suleman
Exactly which dll is missing during setup?

There is one seemingly obvious thing I overlooked as I was having the same problem, after wondering why I was not able to copy the files from the XP CD to the hard drive in the first place to DO the install... then I realized my boot disk was naming the CD ROM drive 'banana' and that was causing a problem because there is a file on the XP CD with the word 'banana' in it. Go figure... for this error where setup can't find the files to copy, it seems the XP Setup is looking for the files to be in the 'i386' folder of wherever you copied the files on the hard drive. So in other words, if you are installing XP on C: and you copied the i386 folder of the Win XP CD to D: (second partition on the hard drive) they need to be in d:\i386. Hope this helps!

Welcome to Windrivers peircedsphynx and thanks for the tip!

Holy thread necromancy Batman! :)

Though this is still a relevant issue, even today.

~Dave