XP setup boot disks and hardware support

[Guest]

I have the sticky situation of having an oldish laptop with a broken DVD
drive. Much of the inconvenience of this has been negated by the purchase of
an external firewire DVD drive, but last I checked, you cannot boot off of a
firewire device, at least not with my hardware and BIOS. This has precluded
my bi-annual Windows re-installs which are quite important to me for all the
manner of spiritual and technical reasons.

I can, however, attach a floppy drive through USB and boot through that.
Happily, Microsoft still provides bootable setup diskettes for Windows XP on
its website, but I'm curious as to whether there are IEEE1394 device drivers
hidden within those scant 6 diskette images. Since the relevant article
sternly warns that such bootable setup disks are available only through
Microsoft, I am left to the winds of chance on this one, as there seems to be
no prospect of customizing my own setup disks.

Yeah, I know I could just buy another CD drive, but this baby is getting
old. I may as well buy a new computer, too. But before I do that, I'd like to
try this last thing out. Any ideas?

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Unless you have a serious problem with Windows I would forgo the semi-annual
ritual because, as you say, you are approaching the time to buy a new
computer.

 

[D.Currie]

I have the sticky situation of having an oldish laptop with a broken DVD
drive. Much of the inconvenience of this has been negated by the purchase
of
an external firewire DVD drive, but last I checked, you cannot boot off of
a
firewire device, at least not with my hardware and BIOS. This has
precluded
my bi-annual Windows re-installs which are quite important to me for all
the
manner of spiritual and technical reasons.

I can, however, attach a floppy drive through USB and boot through that.
Happily, Microsoft still provides bootable setup diskettes for Windows XP
on
its website, but I'm curious as to whether there are IEEE1394 device
drivers
hidden within those scant 6 diskette images. Since the relevant article
sternly warns that such bootable setup disks are available only through
Microsoft, I am left to the winds of chance on this one, as there seems to
be
no prospect of customizing my own setup disks.

Yeah, I know I could just buy another CD drive, but this baby is getting
old. I may as well buy a new computer, too. But before I do that, I'd like
to
try this last thing out. Any ideas?

Find a way to create a second partition on your hard drive that is about
700mb. Copy your XP install CD there. Boot with your floppies, then run the
setup from your 2nd hard drive partition and install on the first partition.

I'm not guaranteeing this is going to work. Seems I did it once with a
laptop that had no CD drive, but I might be thinking of some other painful
install.