Can I install XP from a hard drive partition?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Atlanta Panther
  • Start date Start date
A

Atlanta Panther

In old Win95 and 98 days, I used to copy the Windows CD to
a seperate partition in my hard drive (where I also copied
other software). I then did a clean install from that
partition to
the C: Drive after booting from a WIN98 boot floppy. The
reason for this is that I travel a lot and I always wanted
to make sure I had a copy of my installation CDs for all
my software on my laptop without having to carry them
everywhere I went. In this case, I would always have
drivers for hardware (printers, etc.) I would encounter on
the road. Plus, if anything was corrupted, I could work
through it. With going to XP on my new D800 Latitude, I
have found XP to be a challenge when trying to do this.

I have repartitioned my hard drive and copied XP to a
seperate partition and have tried to use the
i386/winnet.exe program to install windows but it says it
does not recognize my other drives. I suspect that is
because the win98 boot disk does not recognize NTFS
formatted drives. In fact, I had to copy XP onto a FAT
partition just so I could get it to recognize that drive
so I could get access to the XP installation files.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a workaround on this?
What I would really like to do is to have NTFS for all my
partitions, if possible, and have all my installation CDs
copied onto a seperate partition from where I install XP
onto the C: partition.

I appreciate your help!
 
Assuming that your OS doesn't get blown away and that you can at least boot
in Safe Mode, you can then navigate to the 2nd partition and run Winnt32.exe
from that same folder. This will allow you to repair or re-install over the
existing OS.
 
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