I'm having trouble with the supposedly bootable XP installation CD. I have used it before successfully but on an IDE drive. THis machine has a SATA drive and I understand that this can cause some problems with a pre-SP1 installation CD. THe CD is not in perfect shape so I am trying to borrow one to try. Any thoughts on this? I tried with the six floppy installation package but this doesn't work either. When I try running the WINNT.exe from the CD as suggested I get an error message saying there is not enough room for the swap file. 153 GB are supposed to be available. I tried preparing the HD with fdisk but perhaps that program is the problem since it doesn't allow for the NT file system and limits the partition size. Thanks for any suggestions.
Download a tool called Nlite. Then google for "SP2 for IT professionals" or something like that - its pretty big but this veraion of sp2 is a single .exe , so can be used again and again.
you can then use the nlite program to integrate service pack2, drivers (for the sata download your motherboard/chipset drivers to a folder and point nlite at the .inf files) , hotfixes (e.g ie7) and produce an .iso image, which can be burnt to a cd.
this process is called slipstreaming.
I advise you NOT to remove any windows components using nlite, and not to apply any tweaks - if you mess about with stuff you dont understand, it will cause problems later on.
Thanks for your response. A quick question that may be foolish, but since I no longer have a floppy drive I have no way to input these programs. Do current motherboards have a native ability to recognize USB drives? Since it sees a USB mouse OK, I'm hoping I can load the programs you mention this way without any driver. Sorry, but I've forgotten more than I ever knew about computers. Mark
yes
but like i said, you dont need to do the whole hit f6, then insert driver floppy thing
you can use nlite to integrate the service pascks and drivers dfirectly onto a new windows cd
Got it. Thanks jbennet. It was just a corupted CD that wouldn't boot. Now I can't get it to use by DSL modem. I won't bother you again until I am pulling my hair out.
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