F6'ing the WinXP Installation w/o floppy

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Originally Posted by OMGmissinglink

... As far as the other programs he did not want with the Laptop install disk window does include one handy tool unstall programs.

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Yes, but I am not about to spend a week to track all the registry keys directories and all the other crap that the programs have produced and the uninstakk routine "forgot" to delete :).

By the way, as you can see from the list of boot locations I posted, there is NO floppy drive option :). Of course that is not a surprise, since I don't have a floppy on my notebook. I still cant find the regular drivers on the intel website. I do not know why. Good thing they were on the repair CD.

One more thing... What is peta mode? And for the last time my laptop does need SATA controller drivers installed to find the hard drive. Why? Because when the drivers were not slipstreamed to the CD, it found NO hard drives to install to. And when ther drivers were slipstreamed to the CD, it DID find the drive. I don't know how to better explain this.

Thanks again to everyone for the help and the infromation. I am a member of only one forum and this thread just perferctly represents why I have chosen this one.

Stay smart, people!

One other thought..you said earlier that you had a sata RAID config. The specs for that computer show a single sata drive. Often, with a raid config, if you disable raid in the bios, the xp install will see a sata drive. I know this does you no good for a repair install, but I am trying to figure out a single drive raid. (oh..btw..sp2 does include much of the tablet edition stuff, but tablet edition is still a superset of xp pro even with the sp2 installed.)

About the year 2000 I had a PC that had a ATA RAID Controller and I had only one hard drive. I still had to use a floppy disk to install the drivers. I admit I am not too familiar with RAID technology, but I had seen this before, so I wasn't too surprised.

geoscomp:

I have already destroyed the ISO without the slipstreamed drivers, but I will burn it again, disable bios and see what happanes. I really don't think I need it anyway since I have only one hard drive. Am I correct? Is there any reason to have RAID if you have only one hard drive? And regarding the Tablet PC Edition being a "greater" proffesional, I used my OEM recovery CD, so I am hoping that the extended services will be ther, unless they were in the "PRELOAD" directory. We will see.

It is probably just a SATA controller that is RAID capable. I know my NVidia controller on my motherboard can be set up with RAID using the controller set up or after Windows installed. But, yes you do need at least 2 hard drives in order to make a RAID.

Peshek, you don't have to have a BIOS that supports booting from a floppy in order to load a drive controller. If your computer's BIOS can detect an USB diskette drive, Windows Setup should be able to load a driver for your controller. Boot options don't matter.

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Originally Posted by slgrieb

Peshek, you don't have to have a BIOS that supports booting from a floppy in order to load a drive controller. If your computer's BIOS can detect an USB diskette drive, Windows Setup should be able to load a driver for your controller. Boot options don't matter.

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Hehe. I know. I just mentioned that because of what Ferrit asked earlier.

Have you ever looked at nLite?

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4324.html

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Originally Posted by street1

Have you ever looked at nLite?

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4324.html

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Wow...I haven't posted here for quite some time now :_)

street1: Thanks for the tip about nLite. I used it and it worked pretty good, but apparently WinXP SP2 is not sufficient to run my laptop/tablet convertible. In the end, I stayed with the crappy OEM version and I uninstalled what I didn't want. Even took the time to remove strain registry keys and directories so I am in pretty good shape now :_). It took me a while, but it is done.

I did a DriveXML back up yesterday, so even if something goes bad, I have a pretty easy job of restoring things back to normal.

Thanks to all for the help!

Hello Peshek! Very interesting to read how this all turned out! Drive controllers can be stranger than they should be. One of my spare computers has a Promise FastTrack Tx2 RAID controller (even though the machine has only a single drive connected to it at present) and the controller wouldn't let me access the drive until I configured it as a 1+0 Span RAID array!

Hehe. I hear you slgrieb. I recently noticed that the Recovery CD installs a program called "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" - a RAID controller. Don't mind the fact that I have only one hard disk and is absolutely useless to me, except if i wanted to slow down my machine a little bit :). AND there was a process in the start up tree that was supposed to let me know if an error occured with the RAID operation. WoW! How helpful would that be for me?!? :grin:


I haven't had the time to try it, but I am pretty sure that I can safely remove that garbage and still run my machine as normal. What do you think? And if you in fact believe so too, what should I back up if something goes bad hehe. You never know.

Thanks.