Installing windows XP on x61s (with no cd drive)

[patch]

I have yet to find a successful way of installing windows XP without an external cd drive. Right now I have SuSE 10.2 installed, and the hard drive partitioned the way I want. All of the linux method's I've read worked so far, but none of the windows methods have had any success.

The resources I have access to is:
a 4 gb USB pen drive (used to install linux)
a usb floppy drive (I've booted into Dos and FreeDos with it)
and a network, (I can set up a PXE server)

I have been able to boot into Dos using both the USB pen drive and floppy drive, but when I try to initialize the XP installation ( i386/winnt.exe ) in a slipstreamed i386 folder (which, of course, I have placed both in the future C:\ drive as well as the USB flash drive.) it begins copying files to god knows where and just stops after a while. I really have no clue what it does some times. Silly windows.

I would set up a PXE server, but all the solutions either involve using windows 2003+RIS or using a Dos boot (which I already have on a floppy). Eventually I might go through that hassle.

I'm pretty sure I have the right idea in what I have been trying so far, but I must be forgetting about something. I havn't used a real windows, let alone dos, in so long.

Oh I should also mention I have tried BartPE with no success using Tom's Hadwares guide. (doesn't want to boot)

I can take a guess as to where I am stuck. When I boot into Dos it is not recognizing any hard drive partitions (I have sda1 formated as FAT32, with the i386 folder on it, and the hard drive is in SATA compatability mode.). I would fdisk it, reformat C:, and xcopy the i386 folder over again, but I am having issues getting that running too. I can't believe how dated the windows xp install process is!

Anyways, if this post made sense to you i'd appreciate your help. If you can't understand what I wrote it's because I'm a little flustered right now.

[Ideasmiths]

If you have enough Ram, lets say 2GB, then there might be a chance. I did this years ago with no Cdrom.

First you would need a software that can create a Ramdisk with lets say 1GB of the ram in NTFS format. There was a software around that could do so and when you do a reboot, it would not erase the Ramdisk. Next get Bios to boot from the ramdisk. I can't remember the name of the Ramdisk software, probably have to google it.

So the next two steps is easier, just create a XP system on the Ramdisk, download a softare that recoginise virtual ISO CD, copy your custom XP ISO image there. Next reboot and from the Ramdisk, format your HDD with the required partitions, modify the bootsector to do dual boot and you should be done.

So lets see
a) Ramdisk software
b) Virtual CD software
c) Your custom XP disc
d) A software to create the partitions and dual boot (lets say Acronis or Nortion partition magic, paragon partition magic etc).

Hope that works...

simplier solution of course is to borrow external CDROM and just make it easier.

[mfbernstein]

See this thread. Worked for my X61. Make sure to slipstream in the proper SATA drivers.

[patch]

Thanks guys. Got it working this morning. I was origonally following your guide before, mfbernstein, except I ran into some issues. Anyways I ended up using the Windows 98 SE dos bootdisk, which had smartdrv, fdisk, and format on it, and I reformated drive C:, fixed the mbr with fdisk (it wouldn't work with grub), and started D:\i386\winnt.exe (the i386 folder located on my usb drive) and it installed everything over to C:\, rebooted normally and continued on with the regular installation.

My problem was that I mixed and matched working and broken solutions. Kinda complicated to explain, but lets just say I had one non-bootable usb drive, a few wrong dos setups, and my other OS's got in the way. Anyways, I have it figured out and now I can install XP faster then I have ever been able to before.

Next time I'll try that ramdisk method just because it looks like more fun~