no xp cd

[Rottie]

Hi, a friend of mine has bought a PC World machine with Win XP Home. He has
no XP cd. He says he has a partition on his hard drive with what he believes
is his Win XP, and a floppy with which to boot from in case of any failure
and need for reinstallation.
Is it possible to make a bootable Win XP cd from the contents of this
partition? If so how would he do it?
He would like to be able to reformat etc, in the normal manner of booting
from the cd rom, and not have to worry about keeping the partition.
Thanks for any advice

 

[MostlyHarmless]

I have found that for disaster recovery, one of the
easiest methods is to Ghost the original build (all
partitions). It has saved my rear-end a few times.

There are other ways to do it, but this works for me...

 

[GSV Three Minds in a Can]

Hi, a friend of mine has bought a PC World machine with Win XP Home. He has
no XP cd. He says he has a partition on his hard drive with what he believes
is his Win XP, and a floppy with which to boot from in case of any failure
and need for reinstallation.
Is it possible to make a bootable Win XP cd from the contents of this
partition? If so how would he do it?
He would like to be able to reformat etc, in the normal manner of booting
from the cd rom, and not have to worry about keeping the partition.
Thanks for any advice

Afaik it can't be done .. the best advice would be to buy a PC from
someone who supplies a proper installation CD (pounds to pennies he
didn't get NTBackup either). He can, of course, always go out and pay
the money for a retail copy of XP Home (or an upgrade, if he has a
Win9x/Me CD around someplace).

What's he's got there may also not have the recovery console facility,
or the ability to do a 'repair install' (as opposed to a 'return the
disk to it's ex-factory state' .. i.e. throw away all the users' data
and applications, install.)

 

[Rottie]

Thanks for all your advice!

 

[Alex Nichol]

Hi, a friend of mine has bought a PC World machine with Win XP Home. He has
no XP cd. He says he has a partition on his hard drive with what he believes
is his Win XP, and a floppy with which to boot from in case of any failure
and need for reinstallation.
Is it possible to make a bootable Win XP cd from the contents of this
partition? If so how would he do it?
He would like to be able to reformat etc, in the normal manner of booting
from the cd rom, and not have to worry about keeping the partition.
Thanks for any advice

I don't think the content of the partition would be in a form that could
be used. But what could be done is to copy it away as an image to a CD
set or DVD (if he has a DVD burner). For that sort of thing I use
BootIT NG, from http://www.BootitNG.com ($35 shareware - 30 day full
functional trial). Then the partition could always be restored at need
- eg onto a replacement blank Hard drive.

You might also (after making the backup) unhide it (using BootitNG) and
see what the content looks like when viewed from Windows. Not possible
if the partition is some format of its own, but that is not very likely