Termyn8or
Posts: 18681
Joined: 11/12/2005 Status: offline
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Let's cut to the chase here. You don't need to boot from the CD to install it. You only need that if there is no OS already installed. Thing is, what is your current OS ? If it is 98 the HD is going to be FAT32 not NTFS. You'll have to read up on it's limitations if that is the case, if it is NTFS you are good to go. IIRC NTFS is faster, but XP will run just fine on FAT32. You also don't have the extreme file encryption of NTFS, but I know how to break that anyway. All you have to do is open the CD in Windows explorer or even My Computer. In the root directory you'll only see about a page of files. Look around at the one(s) that say setup. Right click for properties and make sure you got the one that has the MS-DOS name SETUP.EXE. Double click that and setup will start. I've done it a whole bunch of times when the PC's BIOS doesn't want to cooperate. Also if you have certain Compaq PCs without the ROMpaq on the HD you can't even get into the BIOS, but I'm not sure they continued to do that dumb shit in their newer PCs, the P1s and P2 were like that, I am not sure about the newer ones. If you can't find setup.exe, look at the contents and see if all there is is one huge .ISO file. That means it is a disk image ready for burning, which would reconstruct the file system. That would explain not being able to boot from it. If that is so, I think you need Nero to do it, and just burn a CD from it, then use that. It should at that point be bootable. That would explain the problem. I also have this habit of copying the install CD to the HD. If you install from the HD it is alot faster. Then if it ever asks for the XP CD in the future you can just point it to the directory you crated for it, which you generally name the label of the CD, but not if it's a copy. You can also make an XP disk then at will by just burning all the files to a CD, but it will not be bootable. Anyone using it must have something bootable in the PC to use it. One last caveat, if your HD is bigger than 138GB, make SURE you at least get service pack one. If not, writing the 139th GB results in wiping out all data on the drive. SP1 might be on the CD if it is a newr one, not sure. I am pretty sure I have it somewhere. Also if anyone likes 98SE like I do (wow), I have the Windows update files for it. I have been told to guard them with my life and have burned 2 CDs of just them. Ironically, where Windows saves the files, it has a TXT file which says "It is OK to delete these files". Sure is, if your brain is mush, because now you can't get them anymore. So keep an eye out for a new directory formed when you get SP1, and burn it to CD immediately. Some people do not want SP2, not sure why, it is apparently not friendly with certain software or hardware. If indeed someone screwed up and simply burned the ISO disk image to CD, that is a problem. If that is the case, copy it to the HD and look through your burning software carefully for options, you need to burn CD FROM the image, NOT burn the image to CD. If all you have is a 522MB ISO file, that is precisely where someone screwed up. Hope this helps. I hope you are not bootleghgeing XP though, there are already alot of people doing that, they might catch on :-). T
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