Charlie said:
This is about an older lap top with XP home.
There were numerous errors showing up and a diagnostic routine implicated
the HD.
I removed the HD and set it up as an external usb drive on another machine.
This way I was able to save the user's files to a flash drive. The plan was
to clean the HD and reinstall the OS from the manufacturer's supplied CD.
Then I set out to do this, recognizing that typically this action would
first format the HD before the reinstall.
Now a new problem showed up. With the CD in its drive I was ready to go.
This is when stuff hit the proverbial fan. The CD drive came up, took a look
at the CD and decided it couldn't read anything and shut down.
I had thought that if push came to shove, a new HD was less than $70 and
that was a consideration rather than a whole new PC. But if the CD won't
read that will not work.
Question: is there enough of a driver in BIOS to run the CD drive or is this
just a case of a dirty or otherwise malfunctioning drive?
I tried another CD that should have been bootable and the result was the
same.
This laptop does not have a floppy drive. ( I mention this because I still
have an old floppy that had the Win98 recovery files on it. This would have
at least installed CD drivers) It does have USB ports but I don't know if
this machine will boot from a usb port.
Another question: If I were to take this a new HD and hang it on my own PC
(which is running XPpro) and I put the XPhome CD into my CD drive, is there
a way to install the OS from the original restore disk to a this proposed
new HD which shows up on My Computer as a local HD with its own drive
letter. That is instead of installing to the C: drive can I install to the
F: drive?
Suggestions please. The owner of this unhappy laptop is a retiree who only
uses it for email and web browsing and is not enamored of the thought of
springing for a new system.
Charlie
If you slave the new hard drive to your own desktop system, you can create two
FAT32 partitions. I had an 80GB drive the first time I did this, and
made the first partition 78GB and FAT32. The second partition is 2GB and
FAT32. That is the general idea. If your Windows won't format a large
FAT32 partition, like my 78GB example, there is a utility called fat32formatter
that will do it for you. You'd define the partitions with Disk Management,
and then handle the pesky partition with the utility. Don't forget to make
C: partition on the drive "active" so it will be bootable. (Maybe the
installer does that ? Not sure.)
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
In this picture, the utility PTEDIT32 shows the boot flag has been
set on the second partition. What I'm suggesting, is the first (78GB)
partition would have the boot flag value of 80, and the second partition (2GB)
would have it set to 00. PTEDIT32 is a free download from Symantec. I
probably set that partition active, using a Linux LiveCD, since I'm
perpetually flipping back and forth between OSes when doing experiments
like this. PTEDIT32 is good enough for checking the results.
http://www.vistax64.com/attachments...n-partiton-recovery-dell-xps-420-dell-tbl.gif
Now, the next step, is to copy the i386 folder from your WinXP installer
CD, to the second partition of the new drive. (You could call the
second partition D: and the first C:, as that is what they'll look
like later.) The i386 folder has about 5000 files, and it won't use the
entire 2GB partition. But I wanted to leave enough room for other temporary
items I might want to store there later. Like drivers.
The next step, is booting into MSDOS, to do the install. I use a floppy
created with Win98, with a few optimizations added to it, like smartdrv.
Smartdrv provides caching, and makes the install a little bit faster.
If you don't have a floppy, what I did was, use a Linux CD and the "dd"
command, to do a sector by sector copy of my 1440K floppy, onto a USB flash.
There is also a Windows port of "dd", which may be able to do this as well.
The third line here, does a transfer of 1440K which terminates when the
end of the floppy is hit. In cases where you want to copy less than the
entire thing, there are other parameters you can put on the command, to
limit the size of thing transferred. But in this case, the syntax is
particularly simple, as a small thing (floppy) is being copied entirely
to a device with a much larger capacity (USB flash).
http://www.chrysocome.net/dd
dd --list (to get partition and device names)
dd if=\\?\Device\Floppy0 of=\\?\Device\Harddisk2\Partition0
(Harddisk2\Partition0 is how my USB flash is showing up right now)
For some reason, on my computer, I was able to boot from the USB flash,
after it had the floppy image copied to it. Your Mileage May Vary. It
may not work with just any motherboard. It could be a trick specific
to my BIOS. There are also utilities around, like the HP formatter,
that include a copy of FreeDOS. So there may be other recipes that
work. I had trouble with the HP Formatter, and only later got it working.
Anyway, assuming you can find some way to boot MSDOS, you cd to the
i386 folder and run winnt.exe . And that should start the install.
There are two executables, winnt.exe and winnt32.exe, one suitable
for DOS, and one suitable for a 32 bit Windows environment.
D:\
cd i386
winnt.exe
The install should pick up there, as if D: is the CDROM holding the
files.
When you're finished, if your user would prefer the C: partition to
be NTFS, you can use the "convert" utility, to change the partition
over to NTFS. But once you do this, your MSDOS boot media won't be
able to see that partition any more. (There is a package which
makes NTFS visible from MSDOS, but it didn't support LFN long
file names, and is virtually useless for serious repair work.)
So that is a workaround for not having a working CDROM. But
a computer with a defective CDROM is hobbling a bit, and should
be fixed in the long term. The regular desktop CDROM mechanisms are
pretty cheap, and it is too bad that slim laptop drives haven't
followed the trend that the desktop ones have. (I don't see a
reason why they're more expensive.)
So, at the moment you do the install
X: (Whatever the MSDOS flash device is assigned as a drive letter)
C: (Where the install will be going. FAT32 to start. NTFS later optional)
D: (Home of D:\i386 and 5000 files.)
When asked to reboot, you'd want to reboot from C:, and C: should have
been marked active. You could try marking it active when you prepare the
laptop drive using your desktop.
It took me about a solid day of work, getting this all to work, and
most of that time was spent building the "perfect" MSDOS floppy
image. You can shave some time off an install, by doing it this
way, but using the hard drive as a file source, doesn't run as fast
as the hardware would allow. The installation is still restricted
by software performance issues.
To put this in perspective, I'm just a home experimenter and not
an IT guy doing this after work. You'll find this procedure documented
on the web, as that is how I learned of it in the first place. I
didn't invent this.
Microsoft also has a six floppy set of images on their site, which
would do some of this as well, but when I went to the trouble of
booting the six floppies, the process wouldn't do anything. It got
stuck at the end. The content of the floppies has to match the
Service Pack of the install CD, and there is no floppy set for SP3.
In any case, I'm not even sure the six floppy thing has any merit,
because it appears to be checking for a CDROM. It didn't offer me
an option to point it to a hard drive with i386 on it. Maybe I missed
something along the way.
In summary, you're doing the actual install, with the drive connected
to the laptop. You only connect it to your desktop, long enough to
put C: and D: FAT32 partitions on there, and use your desktop
CDROM drive to copy the i386 to D:. The actual install happens
when the prepped hard drive has been reconnected to the laptop.
HTH,
Paul
