XP install - best method...

beer enigma

I have a Compaq machine dating back to the early XP installs & still have the original XP media and licence key.

The XP install is now causing some problems, 5 years on, so it's been good ! - anyway, my question is this.

What's the best way to re-format * reinstall using the original media ??

I can get all the updates from Microsoft & have SP2 on CD already.

The Drive in the machine WONT boot from the XP CD, so I'm presuming I'll have to create boot disks from either XP or 98 ? & re-format the hard drive from there ??

Any ideas would be very gratefully received

Cheers

Jammer

Go into bios, and make CD-ROM the first bootable device. then reboot with the XP cd in the drive

beer enigma

Already tried - works fine with later versions of XP, but not with the original licenced copy I have hence the boot disk query.

galwaydude18

can you not make bootable floopy discs for a win xp setup? I know you could for win 2000 pro but I'm not sure about win xp! Try a search in google for a rapid answer!

mad m

galwaydude18 wrote:

can you not make bootable floopy discs for a win xp setup? I know you could for win 2000 pro but I'm not sure about win xp! Try a search in google for a rapid answer!

Yeah ofcourse you can,bootdisk.com. Its 6 floppys btw.

nutzboutstuff

What options does it give you to boot from in the bios? it could just be a non-booting xp cd. So you can get barts bootable cd creater and create a bootable version of the xp cd. I find that a good thing. you could slip-stream the SP2 install in there, or just when you get it installed the way you want, get something like norton ghost and take a dump of the harddrive, you can get it to split the images (bootable) into 700MB chunks which you can boot and have everything back the way you like it in 20 mins maybe...

You should be able to pull your serial from the xp install using xp key finder or something similar and then the i386 folder you might have installed in c:\ or pull from the install images from original installs...

Let me know how it goes..

Capt'n Midnight

keyfinder - magic jelly bean software will list your serial

One way to do it would be to format the drive, copy the i386 folder to the hard drive and run the setup from there - one floppy instead of one. To do that you would need a boot disk - windows 98 CD or setup floppy will do this. or www.bootdisk.com

nutzboutstuff

If you give me a while i'll find the exe! came with a keygen one time, of course i didn't need to use it cause all my copies are legal...

beer enigma

Thanks - bootdisk.com did the trick.


As I said, I have the orginal disk & licence key, so install went without a hitch - thanks for the help