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Boot sector help for install with no CD, floppy or USB

Forum Windows XP : Windows XP General Discussion - Boot sector help for install with no CD, floppy or USB

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MrLarge   04-30-2009 at 03:55:35 AM

I have an older laptop with no CD drive and which cannot boot from USB. It used to have an external floppy, but this doesn't work any more. I have an external enclosure to take the hard drive out an manipulate it from another computer, but I have no computer with a floppy. I created a small FAT32 partition on the beginning of the disk, and copied Win98 boot disk files to it, as well as WinXP installation files, with the intention of booting this partition, and installing win XP once the win98 command prompt loaded. I set this partition as active, but it didn't boot.

I'm assuming it didn't boot because I did not copy a boot sector. So I have 2 questions: 1) would the boot sector from a win98 boot floppy be appropriate for a 512MB hard drive partition? 2) If not, what bootsector should I use? 3) Where can I get any of the above bootsectors? As I mentioned I don't have a computer with a floppy, and all the boot floppy images I can find will only unpack to a floppy drive (I tried allocatin

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keithmelvin   05-04-2009 at 12:24:56 AM
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MrLarge wrote :

I have an older laptop with no CD drive and which cannot boot from USB. It used to have an external floppy, but this doesn't work any more. I have an external enclosure to take the hard drive out an manipulate it from another computer, but I have no computer with a floppy. I created a small FAT32 partition on the beginning of the disk, and copied Win98 boot disk files to it, as well as WinXP installation files, with the intention of booting this partition, and installing win XP once the win98 command prompt loaded. I set this partition as active, but it didn't boot.

I'm assuming it didn't boot because I did not copy a boot sector. So I have 2 questions: 1) would the boot sector from a win98 boot floppy be appropriate for a 512MB hard drive partition? 2) If not, what bootsector should I use? 3) Where can I get any of the above bootsectors? As I mentioned I don't have a computer with a floppy, and all the boot floppy images I can find will only unpack to a floppy drive (I tried allocatin




had that it was the power supply

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MrLarge   05-05-2009 at 04:13:07 AM
- 0 +

n3f0ur wrote :

http://www.boot-land.net/forums/in [...] owforum=71



Great link, thanks very much. Unfortunately haven't found the solution - but lots of possibilities!

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