Comments on: Can you copy the entire XP Pro CD onto your Hard drive, and set it as a boot option?

Question: Can you copy the entire XP Pro CD onto your Hard drive, and set it as a boot option?

Keyser Soze — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 01:16:03 -0800

I am going crazy about this, and google won't turn up anything useful. Laptop with no CDrom or floppy: Took HD out and installed XP using my desktop. Freezes loading mup.sys. I already installed the MB swap patch.

Basically what I am asking is: Can you copy the entire XP Pro CD onto your Hard drive, and set it as a boot option? Can it work? Does anyone have any ideas?

By: ed\26h

ed\26h — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 01:44:42 -0800

OK. Put the HD back in the desktop and boot up from it.
Copy the XP CD to the HD.
Still on the desktop machine, start an upgrade XP install from the new HD copy of the files.
When it reboots for the first time, power down.
Put the HD back in the laptop and let it boot into setup.
Run though the XP upgrade install on the laptop.
Hopefully all is nice.

By: riffola

riffola — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:39:44 -0800

Just use an external CDROM/CDRW/DVDROM.

By: jfuller

jfuller — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:47:08 -0800

> Copy the XP CD to the HD.

If disk space is an issue, all you actually have to copy in from the CD to do an install is the \I386 tree.

By: jfuller

jfuller — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 06:49:10 -0800

In fact, it's always convenient to have the \I386 tree on your HD, because forever after when Windows says "please insert your Windows CD" you can just point to that directory on the HD.

By: Keyser Soze

Keyser Soze — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 23:01:19 -0800

Thanks, it worked. Here's what i did:

1. Installed XP Pro on desktop with the Laptop HD

2. After install, copied /I386 dir onto drive

3. Double clicked Winnt32.exe and started install

4. Chose full install, reset and moved to laptop. Drive is installing right now.