Reinstalling XP from hd?

Gord.T

Gord.T

Still "Senior Member"
I'm a little hesitant to try this.

Here's my situation.

The original physical XP installation disc is missing. Hopefully I'll get it back in a few weeks.
I have an emergency copy on my hard drive though.
I have two drives, the primary C: and secondary D: with all of my current project files backed up on D:.
My DVD burner is worn out so making a disc from the drive copy is not possible.

I need to reinstall windows completely, not just a repair.
I used to do it from the drive in Wondows95 but I think I had to install dos first.

So, if I have the XP installation CD on C: or D: can I use that to delete my current windows and install fresh on C:?

Or any other ideas? Otherwise I can wait a few weeks until I get the physical disc and do it properly.

-Thanks.
 
Never tried that method but you would have to change your boot drive in the bios and tell it to boot from your D: drive...Seems logical to me but like I said I've never tried it. Just make sure when it gets to format time that you point it to C: and not D:. Good luck:) It just occurred to me that it could get messy if the copy of XP you have on D: is in a folder cos you may then have to direct the system yo look inside the folder where XP resides using all kinds of Dossy type commands and things could start getting strange right about then. I've forgotten most of the little dos I once pretended to know. Ah screw it, I'm way out of my area on this. All I know is that if it were me I'd hack away at it till I got id done and the dishes and garbage would pile up around me till I got it done LOL!
 
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How did you create the emergency copy? Did you just copied the files, or did you use an image/burn program?

Do you have two partitions, or two physical drives?
 
I used MagicISO to make the copy. So the files are as you would normally view them.

I have two seperate physical drives.

I'm really worried about doing something wrong and wiping out the D: drive which has around 1/2 yr's work on it. Alot anyways so losing that would suck.

Maybe something else I could try is to transfer the XP files onto a zip drive and take it somewhere where I can burn a copy. Then I could reformat and do it properly. Probably that's what I'll end up doing to be on the safe side.
 
DVD burners are cheap. Replace your drive, then burn new DVDs and load from that. Or wait until you have your hands on the original DVD. Anything else would be too risky, in my estimation.
 
I just did a few tests to see what was possible. Looks like I'll have to use a CD/DVD.
I forgot how cheap burners are now, so I'll look into that today.
 
If you have access to the files from the original CD, you can do an install from DOS by running winnt.exe from the i386 directory.

If you don't have access to the MSDOS, I imagine FreeDOS would work just as well, but I haven't tried it in this context.
 
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