boot X61 from XP on USB

[mfbernstein]

I have a brand new X61, and I'm trying to 'downgrade' from Vista to XP. The catch is I don't have a CD-ROM drive for the machine. I can easily copy the XP installation data to the drive, since I have an external enclosure with USB. What I need is a way to start the installation.

Supposedly, BartPE can create a bootable XP on a USB flash stick. Unfortunately while the USB stick is recognized, it hangs during booting (after loading the RAM disk, it hangs on "Please Wait..."). Any ideas what may be wrong? Or on how to get XP onto this system, short of buying an UltraBase (I have access to the systems listed in my profile)?

Thanks.

[trifler]

I've had this problem. I would recomend pxe-booting with the help of uda and vmware. (http://www.ultimatedeployment.org/uda/index.html)

Other pxe options are sysangel (http://winner.sysangel.com)

Though as you only have had windows on your hardrive. You should be able to to make your usb-stick bootable with the 622.img bootfile from bootdisk.com and Hp usb storage control software. Then just copy the i386 folder onto the usb-stick. Run winnt.exe and install xp.

Good luck

[mfbernstein]

Though as you only have had windows on your hardrive. You should be able to to make your usb-stick bootable with the 622.img bootfile from bootdisk.com and Hp usb storage control software. Then just copy the i386 folder onto the usb-stick. Run winnt.exe and install xp.

Good luck

Well, I finally got it to work using this last suggestion. Thanks!

For the benefit of anybody else in a similar situation, here's what I did (all the preparation was on an X40 that already had XP installed):

1) Formatted the USB flash drive with HP's utility, using Windows Enabler to make it bootable with DOS.
2) Slipstreamed an XP Pro CD using NLlite to include SP2 and the Intel Matrix Storage Manager (the SATA drivers)
3) Copied the slipstreamed i386 directory onto _both_ the USB flash drive, and the destination hard drive from the X61 (hooked up via external USB enclosure)
4) Copied smartdrv.exe, himem.sys and config.sys (enabling himem) from a Win98 boot disk onto the USB drive.
5) Boot the X61 from USB (Access IBM - F12 - select the appropriate USB drive), launch smartdrv, then launch winnt from the i386 directory.

At this point the install ran more or less normally. The one caveat is that you need to have the i386 directory on the internal drive too, because when XP is finally bootstrapping itself from the internal drive, it may not have access to the USB flash drive (as in my case).

Tracking down all the necessary drivers also took a little time. The HDA Audio/Modem one was particularly a pain.

The good news is that after all this, my new Thinkpad is actually nice and fast (the preload of Vista Business, with only 1GB of RAM was horribly slow).

[Justintoxicated]

Sorry to bump such an old post, but you have to remove the hard drive from the laptop to install XP in this manner? I recently ordered my laptop and will be needing to do this as soon as it arrives. I have no idea how hard it will be to pull the hard drive out and what kind of enclosure to purchase to do this.

I have 2 external USB enclosures but they are sata, so I'm guessing I can just borrow one, pull the hard drive (3.5") and temporarily use it to house the Laptop Hard drive?

[mfbernstein]

Sorry to bump such an old post, but you have to remove the hard drive from the laptop to install XP in this manner? I recently ordered my laptop and will be needing to do this as soon as it arrives. I have no idea how hard it will be to pull the hard drive out and what kind of enclosure to purchase to do this.

I have 2 external USB enclosures but they are sata, so I'm guessing I can just borrow one, pull the hard drive (3.5") and temporarily use it to house the Laptop Hard drive?

Haven't repeated the procedure since, but my recollection is that the install bombed out if there wasn't a copy of the XP i386 directory on the internal drive. You could do this from DOS too, of course (when you first boot the USB stick), but I found it easier to simply pop out the drive and copy it over using another computer.

Removing the drive is quite easy - a 3 minute job requiring only a reasonably small Philips screwdriver. I believe a 3.5" enclosure will work fine, although cheap 2.5" ones can be found for $20 or less.

Alternatively, a USB CDROM drive can be a useful item in its own right...

Best of luck.