Rebel1 said:
I wish I had read this and other suggestions a few hours ago. But I
didn't. I went to Best Buy and picked the Geek's brain. He suggested
using the Toshiba Recovery disk, but I couldn't find it or any of the
paper work that came with the laptop.
Anyway, I managed to get the laptop to recognize the CD drive, so I'm
attempting to reinstall a fresh copy of XP in the existing partition,
without reformatting the partition.
While reading various files into laptop, there were about 39 files XP
looked for, but couldn't find. So I just skipped them. I then took the
CD to my desktop computer and tried to find several of them. They don't
exist on the CD. Question: Why is the installation program looking for
files that don't exist on the CD (it's a legal Microsoft CD)?
Once I got further along with the installation, the program tried
reading five files from the i386 folder. Claimed it couldn't find them,
but when I browsed that folder all were present. All were checked as
Read Only; none were checked as Hidden. Question: why wouldn't the
program read files that were in the proper folder?
I skipped them and while the installation is continuing as I write this,
various error messages appear and I have no confidence that it will work
right or be stable. Maybe I should try installing on a reformatted c:
drive.
I'm about ready to buy a replacement. This one is over six years old.
Sad part is that I so rarely use it. It's just a backup in case my main
laptop fails while I'm DJing an event. Never once has my main one
failed, but there's always a first time.
Thanks to all.
R1
I can tell you how I installed WinXP.
1) Create two FAT32 partitions. First partition is going to be the new C:
2) Copy files from CD onto D:. All you need from the CD is the
i386 folder, and the 5000+ files in there. So the hard drive
becomes the source. The purpose of the FAT32 partitions, is so
that a relatively recent version of MSDOS can read and write them.
3) Boot computer with an MSDOS floppy. On my Win98 system, I
could do "sys A:" to make an MSDOS floppy. Or, there are even
MSDOS CD compositions (that I've not really tested), that could
be used. If you wanted to test an MSDOS CD image, you could try
the one here.
http://www.infocellar.com/CD/Boot-CD.htm (link near the top)
http://www.virustotal.com <--- Upload files here, to test for viruses
Boot the floppy, and the prompt will be A:>
Change to whatever drive letter contains the i386 folder.
Let's say it is D:
D:
cd i386
winnt.exe
The first stage of install, copies i386 files to C:. MSDOS
is dog slow, and normally, you'd use the less-than-perfect
"smartdrv.exe" cache to speed up the transfer. But without
screwing around, and just letting an ordinary MSDOS floppy
do the job, the partition to partition file copy might take
an hour or so (one file a second maybe, that sort of thing).
With smartdrv running, it might take 20 minutes. I was never
able to get really decent (hardware limited) speed from it.
MSDOS sucks!
That's a way of doing an install, without the CD being read
"on the fly". All it requires, is your own ingenuity, to
find a way to get the i386 folder, to the second FAT32 partition
on the hard drive. You could use a Linux LiveCD and transfer
the files over the network. You could move the laptop drive
to a desktop and "fill it up" there.
I did my WinXP install that way, purely for fun. I read about
it, and decided to give it a try.
For some hints of no particular value, these are my MSDOS files.
This one includes an obscure CDROM driver in the fourth line.
The excluded area in EMM386.exe is due to the usage of a VIA
chipset on the motherboard at the time. The exclusion might be
removable on other systems. I had to painstakingly test that,
boot after boot, until I guessed what range to use. The
"?" on each line here, makes the floppy pause and you hit
Return for each pause to continue on. It's like a "single step"
flavor of booting.
config.sys:
DEVICE?=HIMEM.SYS /TESTMEM:OFF
;DEVICE?=EMM386.EXE /RAM
DEVICE?=EMM386.EXE NOEMS X=A000-CFFF
DEVICE?=XCDROM.SYS /D:MSCD001
FILES=20
BUFFERS=20
DOS=HIGH,UMB
STACKS=9,256
This is autoexec.bat. The first line has something to do with
CDROM drives again. I use the MSDOS floppy for more than one
purpose, which is why it has a few oddities in it. The smartdrv
line, is the one that improves copy performance for this job.
But if you just use a regular MSDOS floppy, start the copy and
walk away, it'll probably be finished in a couple hours.
autoexec.bat:
mscdex /D:MSCD001 /L:R
pause
a:\smartdrv.exe /V 32768 32768 /E:32768
Anyway, I wasted the whole day playing around with that.
And even though copying without smartdrv sucks, you
can probably use a much simpler MSDOS floppy and get the
job done.
So now all you have to figure out, is how to get the
files off the CD.
There are programs which will scan a CD and report the
raw error rate. That's one way to evaluate an optical drive,
if you suspect it's going bad. In this case, you can pull
the hard drive from the laptop, use an adapter cable, connect
it to a desktop computer, and prep the partitions you want
on it (two FAT32, big partition first).
Paul