Bill Cunningham said:
My XP is an OEM product. Therefore I don't have an xp install disk.
Some OEMs do ship bootable XP install CDs. Some use restore CDs. Some use
a recovery partition (bad plan).
It's *not* a given that an OEM system will not have a bootable install CD.
I know I can generate one with winn32.exe
I'm not so sure about that, or that that is the name you meant to type. I
suspect you're thinking of winnt32.exe, which is the Windows-based version
of XP Setup.
Winnt.exe is the command you'd run if you booted with a diskette with CD
drivers. IIRC neither of these have the ability to make a bootable CD.
but I can use one of the 5 disks my manufacturer sent me. The thing is
only the 1st is bootable. The other four aren't.
And that's probably because they don't need to be. They would be inserted
as needed during a system restore, by which point anything needed for the
restore to run was in memory or already installed on disk.
I expect that you'd find that most of the contents of those four CDs are
really only applicable or available during the restore process.
And I would wonder about the results if you made a copy of the files of
those supplementary CDs on a CD you configured as bootable. That might
interfere with the restore process, because things may not be where the
restore expects them to be.
I also have a copy of an old win98 OS I saved onto a disk but it isn't
boot like the original win98 OS boot disk was.
Usually those won't be of any help at all, particularly if the XP system
installs an NTFS filesystem. DOS/Win9x/ME can't read NTFS filesystems.
A boot floppy can be of value if it has CD drivers, so that you can get to a
location with the i386 folder to run winnt.exe and hence start Setup.
HTH
-pk