How do I install Windows XP on a computer without cd drive?

I need to install Windows XP on a computer without a CD drive
I have the following in mind
Please suggest on whether it is feasible or not, or if it cannot work for some reason, what else I can try
The computer can be booted with USB, and I have the windows XP installation files with me
I want to copy the windows XP installation files to the D: of the computer (computer has 1 physical HDD, partitioned into C and D, with Windows XP currently on C: )

This is what I intend to do:

I will create a DOS (or FreeDOS, what ever I can manage) bootable USB, boot in tot the computer with the USB, go to the folder in D drive with the Windows XP setup file, and launch Windows XP setup winnt32.exe from command line

Will this method work? Can FreeDOS launch Windows XP setup, or do I have to make sure I get a version of MSDOS? Will any version of MSDOS work? Once the Windows XP setup is launched in this manner, does it still expect a Windows XP CD to be present on the cd drive? Can this cause any problems during setup?

Please help. Thank you.

Answer

You can find complete instrutions from links:

Roderick van Domburg
and on Weblogzz Posted by Krishna Prasad

You need to download two files for this process:

1. HpUSBformat(2MB) or use BartPE and PE Builder




2. 2.Dos Files(less than a MB) Extract the dos file and run the HpUSB format utility to format the usb thumb drive and make it bootable.



3. Run the USB utility. select the USB drive. select the check box
   create a dos startup disk and check "using DOS system files located
   at and select the target location where you extracted the DOS files.


4. Now copy the setup files from the Win XP Download from Download
   Center Windows XP Service Pack 2


5. In the bios ,set boot priority for the USB as first and perform the
   boot.the cursor will stop with a drive.Type nc and hit enter.This
   will copy all files from usb thumb drive to disk C.

[Note: You can also install directly from the usb thumb drive by typing "cd I386" and then running "winnt".
Remove Your usb thumb drive and reboot your system.The system will enter the windows setup wizard.Then the usual routine as installing from a CD.You are done..!!!

installing-windows-xp-from-usb

xp-from-usb-thumb

or

install-windows-from-pen-drive

Install Windows By Booting From A USB...!!!(PART 2 for NTFS)

DiskToVhd generated VHD is not bootable

I had windows 10 laptop, I used disk2VHD to convert disk into VHD. Now I am trying to mount it to virtual box on another machine, but it seems be not booting.

I used windows 10 ISO and through CMD I think non of my partition has property bootdisk = yes.

Please guide, how can I convert this VHD to bootable ?

Update

I find this article,

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/jonjor/2011/10/04/vm-does-not-boot-following-p2v-or-disk2vhd/

based on it I tried step, on step 8 I am stuck, please see image below

Update 2

This is main machine

More updates based on comments

I still have access to physical machine, it only has 1 C: Drive and rest are two System EFI drive + recovery drive.

When I use Disk2VHD, it only shows me 2 drives to copy not 3.

Answer

What you need is mountvol drive: /S, which mounts the EFI System Partition to a drive letter so that disk2vhd will discover it, where drive: can be any available drive letter (e.g. D:):

Make sure you run both the Command Prompt (for mountvol) and disk2vhd as administrator.

If you have Windows 10 Pro/Enterprise and the Hyper-V feature added, you can also use the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard in Hyper-V Manager (or the New-VHD PowerShell cmdlet) instead to create a VHD(X) from a Physical Drive:

This does not require you to mount the ESP with mountvol.

upgrade - Excel 2003 upgrading to Excel 2010, will it break our models?

My office is upgrading from Excel 2003 to Excel 2010 and we have a lot of tools in Excel 2003 (complex custom formulas, named ranges, VBA, pivots... almost every feature of excel can be found in at least one of our tools).

What kind of problems could crop up? A lot of the stuff I've tried have worked perfectly, but I've heard that some VBA will no longer work and was wondering if there was a list somewhere of which VBA commands might cause problems after transitioning to 2010. I've been told that excel 2007 and excel 2010 are very compatible with each other, but the problem is a few of the excel 2003 things didn't make it to excel 2007 and thus not 2010, so a list of VBA that no longer works in 2007 might be just as helpful.

Answer

A good place to start would be the compatibility documents from Microsoft, including:

Convert a workbook to the Excel 2010 file format and Excel 2007 and Excel 97-2003 features that are not supported in Excel 2010, both part of the larger Use Office Excel 2010 with earlier versions of Excel document.

fqdn - Bugzilla: can I configure one "urlbase" that works internally and externally?

PROBLEM:

I have Bugzillla 3.6 running on Linux, with a Windows 2008 server for our internal DNS.

I need to set Bugzilla's urlbase" so the SAME configuration will work for INTERNAL clients (EX: http://bugs.local/bugzilla) as well as EXTERNAL clients (EX: http://bugs.mycompany.com/bugzilla).

• External works OK: I configure urlbase to "bugs.mycompany.com/bugzilla", and I'm able to log in to Bugzilla from outside our LAN with no problem.




• Internal doesn't work at all unless I hack :





• WORKAROUND: notepad c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts =>

  
  
  

  192.168.1.200 http://bugs.mycompany.com
  

Q: It seems that urlbase requires a fully qualified domain name (e.g. bugs.mycompany.com).

I absolutely cannot use one FQDN for both external clients (bugs.mycompany.com) and internal clients (bugs.mycompany.local).

Is there ANY "one size fits all" option for Bugzilla's "url_base"??????????????

Answer

There is no option such as this. If it were possible to configure more than one URLbase, Bugzilla could only know which one to send to a particular client by knowing the details of your internal network - what is an internal IP, and what is an external IP.

The correct fix is to set up your internal company DNS servers to return the value "192.168.1.200" when asked about "bugs.mycompany.com". Then the Right Thing will happen, and you don't have to edit /etc/hosts on every machine.

Gerv

hard drive - Reinstalling Windows 8 on a Toshiba Laptop C50D after wiping with DBAN - what do I need to keep to reinstall ?

I need to use DBAN on my laptop to completely wipe it before selling it

After the DBAN process, I want to reinstall Win8 which it came with and put it back to a blank but user friendly state for a novice user (i.e. not just give them a blank DBANned hard drive)

My question is - what's the quickest way to ensure I can get it back to a sellable state with Win8 and all drivers installed - as no disks came with it.

e.g. is there an easy way to get a list of the drivers installed ?
e.g. what is the simplest way to make a Windows reinstall CD ?
e.g. what if any licence numbers etc to I need to find/keep ?

I have not used DBAN before so any tips on that would also be useful.
(My research suggests it is the right program to use for my needs).

license key - Fresh Windows-10 Install

A Windows-7 laptop was upgraded to Windows-10 during the Microsoft free upgrade period when they were nudging users to migrate away from 7 to 10.

The system is sluggish and crash prone: I would like create a fresh install with a new SSD from a Windows 10 install .iso burned to a USB drive. Is it possible (and how can) the the license-key from the old drive be recovered and migrated to a fresh install?

If this is not the right question to ask, I would appreciate edits to the questions: thank you.

boot - Hard drive stopped working after trying to delete a partition

So I recently got an SSD, put it in my machine, installed my OS on it which is Windows 8.1 64bit, and after booting everything was perfect. I had an older hard drive of 1TB, and an SSD of 120GB. The 1TB hard drive was split into 4 different partitions of different size, but I had an OS installed on the old hard drive, figured I could just erase it afterwards.

So I basically formatted the 100GB partition of the hard drive, and then decided to delete it so it turns into free space which I can use to expand some other partition, unfortunately the whole deleting process wouldn't finish, I left it running for about 50 minutes and when I came back it was still loading, and it mostly just froze as I couldn't do anything. I figured it didn't even start deleting yet, so I gave my PC a restart, however it all went downhill from there. My hard drive seems to be defective, I tried disconecting my SSD for instance just to see if I could boot into a Windows CD, but no. As long as my hard drive is connected, I can't even get to BIOS or anywhere else, I just get a blank screen with "A3" written in the corner.

Is it corrupt? Can I fix it? Can I get my data off it at least? If you need more details please ask.

Answer

I've seen this sort of behavior with a Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P motherboard, which uses an atrocity of a firmware that Gigabyte refers to as a "Hybrid EFI." If you care to read my tale of woe, I wrote it up on my Web page.

If your computer is based on a Gigabyte motherboard from about three years ago, it's entirely possible that you're running into Hybrid EFI problems. Your best bet in this case is to ensure that everything is booting in BIOS mode, from MBR disks. If anything is set up to boot in EFI mode or from a GPT disk (the two are tied together in the case of Windows), the firmware gets finicky and can hang if it doesn't like what it sees. Figuring out what's wrong is next to impossible. Personally, I managed to get it mostly working for about three years, but when I tried adding an SSD a few months ago, it collapsed and I was fed up enough to replace the thing.

Even if your computer is not built around a Gigabyte motherboard with a Hybrid EFI, it's conceivable that you've got something equally flaky. I've not run across them myself, but I've heard that there are a few other systems like Gigabyte's Hybrid EFI. They mostly date from around the same period; anything bought in the last year or two should use a more robust system.

That said, it's also possible that your disk(s) itself/themselves are defective and causing the problems. Attaching them one at a time to another computer, running SMART tests, and backing up your critical data would be in order.