Yeah, I thought it wasn't possible too, but I wasn't 100% certain because I read in a thread somewhere where somebody did actually manage to do it. But from my experience, you would need to delete the partition from Disk Management, and then recreate it as FAT32.

You would need to get Windows working on the PC first, in order to create an image. The image can be stored on a seperate partition, or disk, and used quite easily when things go wrong. You would also need something like Norton Ghost to create that image as well.

Your copy of Windows will work any any HDD, yep no problems there.

I've finished at my workshop today, so as soon as I'm there next, I will try the NTFS solution for you, if you don't find an alternative before then. No prob's.

Thanks again, madmonkey. I really, really appreciate you taking time with me and my case. I´m getting nowhere on my own.

I came to wonder if it is possible to place a boot loader - either write one (if so, how?) or copy from somewhere? (where?)

The innstall starts nicely when I point to winnt.exe, but stops and displays a message saying (in Norwegian) something that translates roughly to "the installation cannot continue because it can not load/start the boot loader"

Could be I´m naive here...that it may be just the first of many obstacles...??

Boot Loader for NTFS consists of the following files to allow the system to boot to a particular disk partition: boot.ini, io.sys, msdos.sys, ntldr, and ntdetect.com.

You can copy these files from your local c:\, which may help with winnt.exe (should be able to install without this), but would not be enough to boot to since without an operating system installed, there would be other considerations to take into account:

1) boot.ini tell's the system where to boot to. Normally this is pointed at the Windows OS, but since this isn't installed, it has nowhere to go. We *may* be able to point it to winnt.exe.

2) Since were now using a completely new partition on this disk, we would need to flag the disk to boot. You'll need software to do this. I have a free version of it on floppy somewhere, so if you like I can dig it out, upload it to a server somewhere, and then you can download it from there?

If you could see if setup starts with these files first, I'm back at the workshop tomorrow, so I'll test out whatever you need.

I have previously tried to copy these and a few more files to the hard disk from the intallation CD and from another computer also running XP professional (boot.ini) - at no avial.

What´s strange: I now copied each and every file and folder from the CD to the hard disk (root). When I usb attach it to this working laptop, it goes straight to setup.exe and wants to install (I stop it not to have yet another ruined windows installation!!).
But, not when I put the hard disk back into the laptop it belongs to!

Why on earth...?

BIOS is ok, I have set harddisk as 2nd boot option.

NTFS vs. FAT32: I deleted another NTFS hard disk (also USB attached, extra drive) and then re-formatted it to test if I could change the file system. Didn´t work. So, looks like I´m totally stuck with NTFS.

The disk is still one partition (save for the small 2mb FAT32 section). I tried run diskpart to create a partition to place the installation folders in, hoping that a small partition w/CD files in it could perhaps substitute a CD-drive. But, I never found out how to partition the disk (typed ´create´ ... I just got confused... DOS commands is Greek to me).

Hey karin,

I setup a test PC, copied the i386 folder onto an NTFS partition of a spare HDD, used NTFSforDOS and reproduced the problem you were having. After investigating further, I found that it wont be possible to start Windows XP setup from this disk. I thought maybe it was trying to setup a boot loader on the HD, but the problem I found was that it needed a FAT32 boot loader, just to start Setup, and doesn't work with with an NTFS one.

Which brings me back the my original idea, of setting up the disk with FAT32, which you have had problems doing? What problem did you encounter?

I'll write a procedure for partitioning a small portion of the disk, in FAT32 so that you always have a copy of Windows setup on there, incase anything goes wrong with Windows in the future. Kind of like a recovery partition, but you'll just need a startup disk to access it. Bear with me, some of this is off the top of my head, I'll try to provide screen shots also.

OK..

- Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management.

- From here (bottom right) you will see you disks and their current partitions. Right click on your disk, and Delete Partition. (You should then have "Unallocated" for your drive).

- Right again, and Create Partition.


- In the creation wizard, click Next until you reach the size for your patition, select 1gb or 1024mb, will leave enough room for your i386 folder and maybe a little extra for anything else you may want to put in there at a later date.

- Before completing the wizard, you'll have an option of what file system you want to use, NTFS or FAT32. FAT32!

- Well leave Computer Management for now. You should still have unallocated space, but you'll have an option to create the Windows XP partition during the install.

- Now copy the contents of the Windows XP CD onto that partition and you'll be set to go on your PC.

- Use the Windows 98SE disk I provided earlier to boot and try the install again.

That did not work, either.

I copied the CD content to the partition I had made for it,assigned he letter G to make sure i would find it, fired up the computer using the boot98 diskette, loaded smartdrive (smartdrv), pointed to G:\i386\winnt.exe. And all seemed so well...
The the installation program asked for smartdrive! I had the choice between continuing without smartdrive or quitting, So, I continued... Next, it displayed a messege about not being able to copy banana.ani (or bandana?). When all files were copied to the harddrive, which took more than 2 hours, the text displayed said I was to remove all removable devices and restart by pressing enter o continue with installation. I did. And all stopped, screen went black, fans went on full speed. I gave it a couple of hours wait but nothing happened.
Tried 3 times, same sad result. Don´t know why that file does not want to copy.

The hard disk now has a 1GB sized FAT32 partition with the CD files on it, the rest split in a of FAT32 (did that just to be assured it could access FAT32 space) and the rest NTFS unallocated space. The hard disk is 60 GB sized and should be way large enough.

Would it be wise to re-arrange (delete a partition) to have only the 1GB partition with te CD files on and the rest as unallocated space?