Tinyxp on tiny media

December 9, 2008 1:09 AM

I want Tinyxp Rev09 to to boot and install to a system's hard drive from a USB key, no CD's involved. How?

My googling turned up lots of linux knowledge about this, and I imagine I could make it work if I were installing a Linux distribution, but it seems like there's comparatively little out there for xp.

There is BartsPE, but that seems to want a CD to go with it. Am I wrong? And the USB key version of tinyxp that's floating around the torrent networks is a live environment and doesn't have the repair utilities that the tinyxp CD comes with (which are the clincher for me).

This particular machine can boot from USB if I set it up to emulate a floppy (which from my googling just indicates you have to format the drive with FAT16 before you throw on the boot sector). I might be wrong about this too, but USB boot options are listed in my Award 6.00Pg BIOS. I know the laptop without an optical drive I'm planning to use this on can. But I'd like to turn this into a universal solution for my installs, rather than digging out my DVD's every time something goes wrong, so the more backward compatibility I can pull out of it the better.

posted by saysthis to computers & internet (2 comments total)

UBCD for Windows is based on BartPE and offers the ability to build a bootable USB drive, which I use quite often for data recovery. Not sure if it is something that could help with your situation but you might find some help playing around with that tool and soliciting advice in their active forum.
posted by genial at 7:03 AM on December 9, 2008

This tutorial uses PeToUSB which I've personally had success with for installing XP to my EEEPC (which has no CD drive).
posted by tybeet at 7:42 AM on December 9, 2008 [1 favorite]