How to get a Bootable-CD contents to bootable HD?

[harrison]

Hi there all,
I have a Thinkpad 240X laptop which is known for its small size and the fact that it does not have a built in floppy drive or cd-rom drive.

Because of this I have invested in a 2.5" external usb 2.0 enclosure to work on the hard drive from that laptop.
I am in the process of trying to figure out how I can simply drop contents from a bootable cd onto the clean (or multiple partitioned but clean) hard drive so that I can simply stick compiled hard drive with bootable cd content back into the 240x laptop and have it boot and read the "bootable cd on hd" contents and proceed with the install for WinXP from there.

Can anyone help? I do understand that this may require some tweaking but definately dont know where I should start. I would greatly appreciate any feedback/tips/software as such to do this.

Thank you.

 

[Codesmith]

People over at ultimate boot CD modify it to boot from a USB drive. Thats where I would head first for such a project.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com

Let us know if you get it working.

 

[harrison]

Nope,
Unfortunately no USB bootablility with this laptop.
Thanks for the input though.
Any other suggestions are appreciated.

 

[jap0nes]

let me see if i understand...

you want to install windows xp from scratch but you cant boot from the cd?
you can try to do the following:

- your drive must be formatted in fat32
- get a win9x installation, copy the following commands to your disk: sys, attrib, del, deltree, move, command.com. I dont know if the command sys needs some .sys files to work.
- copy the I386 folder from your windows xp cd to your hd.
- boot to the command prompt of xp (cant remember the name)
- run the command: sys c: (that will make your c: bootable (i hope))
- then, at c: run attrib -s -h -r *.* that will show some files in the directory
- at c: run del *.* that will delete all the old xp files from the directory
- rename the program files folder to something else.
- rename the documents and settings folder to something else.
- rename the windows folder to something else.
- enter the I386 folder you copied and run: winnt

that should direct you to the winxp installation.

DONT FORMAT YOUR DISK IN THE XP INSTALLATION

i'm not responsible for any damage you may cause to your system

ps.: in principle, you dont need to backup, as you wont format your disk.

 

[Codesmith]

They discuss the detail of how the CD boot process works and how to replicate that process on another device. A lot of their discussions could be applied to hard drives as well as USB storage drives.