help please.....windows setup problem

CTU_Agent

im trying to do a fresh install of xp onto a laptop from a cd.

Couple of things:

1) im booting from a floppy with support for my PCMCIA card (CD ROM)

2)i have the drivers for the Card/CD rom and i am able to access it after booting from the floppy

3) I cant see my C:\ Partition (NTFS) when i boot from the floppy

However when it starts up i change to the i386 folder then run winnt.exe but i get an error saying it has no where to put a swapfile....

What can I do? Any ideas?

Capt'n Midnight

the problem is NTFS - it can only be written to using a copy of windows

if you are using a pcmcia cd then you may need to check your XP license as I suspect the laptop may be rather old

The DOS part of setup can't write to NTFS
The PCMCIA card stops you booting off the CD so you have to start in Dos.

Options if you already have windows then copy the files off the CD and run setup from inside windows.

Get a CD recognised by laptops BIOS such that you can boot from it.

get a live linux disk and resize the partition so you can make room for a fat32 one and copy windows files there and then run setup

lifebook

just fdisk the harddrive back to fat32

install windows on fat32 partition

then run the fat32 - ntfs drive converter


simple or what ????

Orion

You can't convert the drive back to FAT32 without destroying the data on it unless you use a licenses piece of software like Partition Magic.

lifebook

CTU_Agent wrote:

im trying to do a fresh install of xp onto a laptop:

Looks like it doesnt matter about old data. He is doing a fresh install.