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xp home addition startup disk needed

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by nlane126

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I have gone to windows site to download the start up information and placed it on the 6 formatted floppy disk but each time it says a file is corrupt and cancels the installation, either I get 3 loaded or 4 is there away to make a copy from my current system, I had 98se on a computer that I am upgrading and have purchased another copy of XP home edition. I did fdisk c and then reformated but the cd-rom drives doesn't see the installation disk, since it can't read it in dos. I know about site like bootdisk.com just wish for a simple answerto get this done thanks.

9 replies

by techierob

Sounds like your doing it the wrong way around;

With windows 98 and above you can have the option to boot the set-up process directly from the cd... you don't neccesarily need a "boot disk" at all.

To enable "boot from cd" you have to go into the pc's BIOS and change the boot sequence to have the cd rom device as the first boot device. Doing this will enable a "boot from cd prompt" after the system POSTS.

If you are stuck for a windows XP boot disk; the best advice I can give is use a windows 98 disk and boot the system with "cd rom support". Then; you can change to the cd device in DOS and run the setup that way.

Let me know how you go :)

-Rob

by nlane126

Thanks this was a good answer I will remember it the next time I have this problem. Thanks

by nlane126

I have done that used the win 98se boot disk to set up cd-rom and even changed the boot up order and still it says invalid system disc so its still not seeing the cd-rom with xp in it, I checked it again and did everything like I was loading 98 again and just stopped the installation, so it works just doesn't read it when xp is there, is there another way to do it.

by nlane126

Thanks this is what did it for some reason it didn't accept all the file to the hard drive when it copied the I386 file but I just loaded them from the xp cd-rom.

by nlane126

Thanks I'll try this one and let you know. I have a feeling this one should work, thanks I tried that site last night and for some reason it wouldn't let me downloand anything, maybe I didn't give it enough time.

by diskaus

I know exactly how you feel, i have had exactly the same thing happen to me only with XP Pro.
The ansewr is rather simnple actually,. First format your drive/partition (on which you want to install XP onto)either use a third party utility like Partition Magic ( demo version can be downloaded from http://www.tucows.com/harddrive95_default.html) or just use your win 98 startup disk and format - fat32, then make either make sure your boot sequence is set to boot from cd rom first, or use the 6 XP setup floppies , once CDRom kicks in and it should give you an option to format again with 4 options , it is best to format again but this time use NTFS ( IMPORTANT - FAT 32 DOES NOT RECOGNISE NTFS AS WEL AS FAT32 DOES NOT SEE NTFS, BE CAREFUL THAT YOU SELECT THE CORRECT PARTITION TO FORMAT ( if you have another partition on the same drive )
good luck :-)

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