How to create an engineering (WinXP repair/reinstall) partition?

[Guest]

Many vendors [such as Dell] distribute their computers w/o the XP CD: they
provide a partition on the HD with the XP install/repair s/w. As I'm doing a
full reload of XP on a crashed, home-built system, I wondered if there's any
way to make a comparable partition on that HD. My suspicion is yes: in an
interrupted (F8?) boot you may be able to choose between different
OS's/partitions.

Q#1: Is it possible to access/boot-from a repair partition under generic
BIOS's? [How?]

Q#2: Can someone give me a link to how to create/layout that partition? I'm
familiar with making a bootable CD, and rash enough to think it can't be too
different from that.

Thanks... I've tried Googling for the answer but been buried in irrelevant
hits.

 

[Guest]

That first link is dead, but the title was sufficient for me to find other
references.

A lot of information in those links to assimilate.... After skimming each
of them once, I was uncertain that one can boot the PE environment w/o
special hooks in the BIOS. Perhaps a second reading of each link will change
my mind.

Anyway, it's not as easy/straightforward as I expected -- or if it is, it
wasn't evident in the articles.


And, I've another problem to deal with: having misplaced my WinXP Pro
installation disk, I got a copy of one -- but it refused to accept my CoA's
Product Key. Mine was probably purchased at SP0 time, and this was SP2...
but I didn't expect that to raise any problem, and hoped to save the SP
installations. Sigh.

 

[Ricky]

You can go here and see about slipstreaming SP2 into your install CD..
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/slipstream.htm