WinXP Home Edition HDD to Another PC

SNIP

There is yet another way to do this.

Ingredients:

Working hard drive with two partitions.
Floppy drive with MSDOS on it (sys A: in Windows 98)
Technician computer, to prepare the hard drive.

Procedu

1) Create two FAT32 partitions. C: should be the first partition
on the disk, in terms of MBR primary partition entries. If you
were to swap the order, the installed OS appears on D: . Ask
me how I discovered this :-(

+--------------------------+--------------------------------------------+
| FAT32 C: | copy of CD i386 folder, on FAT32 partition |
+--------------------------+--------------------------------------------+

2) Create a MSDOS floppy on the Win98 technician computer.
I think that's "sys A:" or so. it's OK if you don't have Win98 computer
any more, as long as you have an MSDOS boot floppy that gives the
old A: prompt. If desperate, you can get a boot floppy of bootdisk.com
or similar.

3) Set boot order to floppy, then hard drive, on the target computer.
Bring the hard drive over from the technician computer, with the
5000+ file i386 folder stored on the second partition. You copy
the i386 folder, off the installer CD, to fill the second partition.
I made my second partition about 1GB in size.

4) Boot the MSDOS floppy. CD to D:\i386. You will notice two setup
programs. One is suited to this installation, the other is not.
Try them, until the installation window appears.

5) I think on the reboot, you remove the MSDOS floppy, as by that time,
the necessary contents of i386 have been copied over to C:, the boot flag
has been set on the first partition, the MBR boot code loaded and so on.
The installation will then continue, referencing D: as the source of
any additional files.

The purpose of that procedure, is to avoid the usage of a CD at all.
The disadvantage of the approach, is C: ends up as FAT32. While
you can use the "convert" command to convert FAT32 to NTFS, the
conversion block size is too small for efficient operation. There's
probably a few more steps you could throw in, to fix that. But this
post is crazy enough as it is :-)

I installed the WinXP on my current computer, using the above method.
(I did it "just for fun".) On my MSDOS floppy, I included smartdrv as
a caching software. The time taken to research smartdrv, test it, I
could have finished the install. Without smartdrv, the partition to partition
file copying, happens at a rate of one file per second. Just walk away
and check back every once in a while, to see how it's going. It'll probably
take a couple hours, if you don't have smartdrv loaded.

There are other floppy sets you can use for this job, but when
I tried one of them, it just didn't work. So I tried the
MSDOS bootstrap procedure instead. And I eventually got
it to work.

HTH,
Paul

Hi Paul,

I may give that procedure a try.

Another responder wondered if I was using a USB connected CD drive.
I am using the internal CD drive.

FYI:

I am using a FAT32 system. My HDD is a 10G or a 20G (I have several).
This Global brand desktop computer is from the late 1990s.

Note: Since I have other computers with WinXP, I am in no hurry
to install WinXP on this Global PC.

Again, Thank You, John