Installing Windows XP using a non bootable CD and no floppy disks
Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me to install windows XP for him and take care of finding and downloading all the necessary drivers to his machine.
He provided me with a copy of Winxp Pro Cd. However, the CD was not bootable and there were no boot floppy disks with it.. So I found a pretty simple way to do this. It took me a while to find the solution, so I feel compelled to share it with those who might run into the same problem: (you need another working computer with a CD burner to do this by the way)
1: Get bootcd . Boot CD lets you create a bootable CD that has the necessary utlities to get your computer up and running for a windows install. It also allows you (among other cool things) to make your C: drive bootable so you can later on launch the windows install from the CD.
2. Uncompress the .zip file. The file contains an ISO file that you can use to create the Boot CD using your preferred CD burning tool. (I used Roxio)
3. Boot up with the CD you created (don’t forget to activate booting from the CDROM on your BIOS settings)
4. You will be given several options as to what CD driver you want to use.. press enter (first option offers support to most CDROM drivers)
5. Switch to the R: drive (all the utilities provided on the CD can be accessed from there)
6. Now depending on the state of your OS installation, you might wanna play around with fdisk or some other utilities to create a FAT32 partition, or format an existing one (refer to the README file that comes with Boot CD for the list of utilities and what they do). let’s assume for simplicity that you need a fresh install, call fdisk to create a new partition (and delete the existing one(s) if any), then format it using “format”.
7: Execute a utility called setuphd so all the basic system files are transferred to the C: drive. This will make C: bootable and make the CDROM recognizable from the start.
8. We’re almost there. Reboot your computer (remove the CD now or change your BIOS settings to boot up from the Hard disk)
9. Insert the Windows XP installation CD and type R: to switch the CDROM.
10. Go to directory R:\i386, then type “winnt” to launch the install.
11. At this point windows installation will take over.
Quick note: You might wanna convert the FAT32 partition (if you formatted the whole disk as FAT32) to an NTFS one. The Windows installation program will prompt you regarding this. Or you can keep it until all is installed and use the NTFS conversion utility that comes with your XP.
Ok, so here is my quick and sloppy guide to installing a non bootable Win XP CD on a computer with a defective or no OS. Hope it’ll help someone out there.
Tom U. said,
April 18, 2007 at 7:21 am
Thanks!
Exactly what I was looking for!
Tom
Witek said,
May 15, 2007 at 6:42 pm
Brilliant!
This came of great help!
Cheers mate!
Vic said,
May 26, 2007 at 5:16 pm
Thanks! This saved me after several other approaches failed.
I couldn’t find “hdsetup”, it was really “setuphd” if I remember right. And I hit an interesting snag: setuphd and fdisk would not operate on my ntfs partition, so I had to nuke it and recreate it as fat32. Of course then the Win XP installer converted that back to ntfs for me, so no problem. BTW, this was a bootable disk, but for some reason this particular old PC could not see this particular disk at boot time.
Simo said,
May 26, 2007 at 7:12 pm
Thanks for the correction Vic…I’ve edited the post.
Fred said,
June 19, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Awesome. You are my hero.
Nic said,
June 28, 2007 at 3:26 am
Lovely,
I am going to try this.
Regards
Nic
How to install WinXP with no floppy or bootable cd? « Troubleshooting PC Problems said,
August 23, 2007 at 9:08 pm
[...] Troubleshooting PC Problems PC Users helping each other « Windows Errors : Best Of? How to install WinXP with no floppy or bootable cd? August 24th, 2007 This is very helpful if you encounter the same problems. Have a look here [...]
PakNik said,
August 23, 2007 at 9:15 pm
I’ve never came across this kind of problems before, but I’m sure it will prove very helpful if I ever did. Thanks a lot
Chen said,
September 15, 2007 at 1:02 pm
Lifesaver!
Thank you so much. This is an amazingly useful CD. One to keep in the collection.
You are truly ghetto pimp.
James said,
September 17, 2007 at 3:11 am
It helped me out. thanks for making it.
doorknob said,
September 20, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Thanks, I was looking for a bootable CD to use to install Windows with no floppy drive.
Scott said,
October 1, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Like the first commenter said, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I’m downgrading my laptop from Vista to Win XP. I had slipstreamed SP2 into a Win XP install disk, but apparently I didn’t make it bootable. My new laptop doesn’t have a floppy drive, so I was stuck until I found your post. I spent all day yesterday Googling and searching for a solution and didn’t find one. I guess I was using the wrong terms, because your site popped right up with the perfect solution first try today.
Eduardo said,
December 5, 2007 at 6:36 pm
Of course it helped. Thanks
dharmveer said,
December 28, 2007 at 10:11 am
i want to create a bootable xp unattend installation cd how can i do? plz help me ?
Simo said,
December 29, 2007 at 3:14 pm
dharmveer : Sorry I can’t help u with that.. Unfortunately I don’t have that kind of experience with Windows XP! Good luck
Jaakko H. said,
January 12, 2008 at 11:14 pm
This saved my laptop! I was already becoming desperate as the restore discs of my HP Pavilion ze5500 couldn’t recognize the CD drive for some reason and I couldn’t figure out a way to install the original pack. Luckily with your help I was able to install a clean (and uncluttered) XP version from a ‘backup’ disc that I found in my drawers… THANKS!
hasril said,
January 28, 2008 at 12:19 pm
thanks god..thanks for your great article..now I can install windows XP on my beloved Acer.
scott t said,
February 12, 2008 at 4:23 pm
hey guys… will this work if I want a Vista and an XP partition? Didn’t want to try this in case I screwed up my Vista partition. Thanks
Camilo said,
February 24, 2008 at 7:18 am
Excelent! Before finding your page I was considering PART PE, which is a great tool, but too much hassle for what I needed: boot my laptop so I can install Win XP from a non bootable CD.
eautiful!!!!
Camilo said,
February 24, 2008 at 7:19 am
one more last coment: on my laptop, your page looks very difficult to read.. I selected everything on it so I could read easily. Thans again for your great wor!
Maskati said,
March 7, 2008 at 11:23 am
Sir,
I burnt ISO with Nero. Activated my bios to boot from cd rome.Well, so far so good.
Things looked like when I do it with win 98se startup disk ( boot floppy.) There was
DOS all over my
screen but it was giving me warnings about my system getting unstable and advising
me to restart immediately .by pressing ctrl.+alt.+delete.
I have win98se on my p.c. and I did this without using win98se startup disk and
without formatting C:
Should I format C: first and then go in for a clean set up ? I have winxp pro folder on my
one of the drives. File system is Fat 32. I do not want to change it.
Please help step by step. Will I need cd key also ?
Thanks in advance. God bless you.
Maskati.
none said,
April 7, 2008 at 9:22 pm
thanks
sameer said,
April 19, 2008 at 2:35 am
Great…
Sounds good.
I’ll surly try it.
Thanks.
Ben said,
April 29, 2008 at 6:58 am
Your link to bootcd is dead. Can you give me another link.
Thanks.
Simo said,
April 29, 2008 at 8:44 am
link to bootcd has been updated… thanks for the catch!
dean said,
May 10, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I just finisht formating and now when i want to run setuphd from the R: drive i get the message: cdr101 not ready reading drive R.
And if i try a other command it says the same thing.
what am i doing wrong?
Denise said,
June 4, 2008 at 4:53 pm
God………….I love you. THANKS………YOU’RE A FLIPPIN GENIUS!
windows help said,
August 16, 2008 at 10:15 pm
nice post. very helpful and useful. now i can install xp in my usb key
thanks
BenQ said,
August 25, 2008 at 9:51 am
U really make my day by providing this info cos i was not so much an IT literate but just helping out a colleague reformat her pc,was trying for a long time before i finall found your solution.Thks man ….u are e man
MarcT said,
September 14, 2008 at 8:00 pm
I was able to get this working as well, thank you for the post and CD!
I did run into one fairly major issue with the default drivers used in option CD1 – it appears that they use the ISO-9660 character set when copying the windows installation files from the CD to the hard drive. This caused 12 of the installation files to have their file names changed because the ISO-9660 character set could not interpret underscores and tildes (_ and ~) in file names. These files were then reported with errors when I tried to install windows.
I found a post that describes this issue here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/Unattended-Install-Problem-t11436.html
My resolution was to copy the windows files to the c: drive, and then to use the DOS RENAME command to rename the corrupted file names with the correct file names.
Arun said,
December 11, 2008 at 10:30 am
great my dear friend
Rizky said,
December 24, 2008 at 10:48 am
How to switch to drive R:
I can’t switch it, I am really stuck in A:
Rizky said,
December 24, 2008 at 11:04 am
Sorry I have found the way to switch. But, when I press setuphd it says “abort, retry, fail?” what does it mean?
Jackson Cropp said,
February 3, 2009 at 2:28 am
Thanks so much
kpbotbot said,
March 24, 2009 at 2:32 am
i ran out of cds
hahahahaha..
question is, does the boot cd run on a USB stick? i cant go out shopping for a blank cd… ^^
please reply.. ^^
Andy Lane said,
July 20, 2009 at 1:12 pm
What do you have to do the same thing for Win 2K? or will this work there too?
Simo said,
July 21, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Andy..not sure about win2k..never tried to do the same thing on win2k, but if you can try it out and let us know that’d be great!
Himanshu said,
November 6, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Hi
This Bootcd image file is not booting on my system. The screen goes blank
and does not do anything.. I am looking for serious forum. Does anybody knows it?