Has anyone sucessfully created a bootable flash drive of an Win XP install? Ive

[tron1062]

Ive tried unetbootin and the xcopy route. With the Xcopy route the computer simply keeps rebooting. with unetbootin I got a message stating that Bootmgr was missing. Since XP uses ntldr not bootmgr that confused me. Can this be done? I am trying to load XP on a laptop in which the cd drive is not recognised. Please help!

 

[tomatthe]

It's definitely possible, there are lots of guides on doing this. If you followed a guide and still aren't having any luck are you certain the machine is capable of booting off a usb device? A much easier solution would be a usb cd drive if you know anyone you could borrow that from.

 

[tron1062]

I know the machine is capable I have booted many USB Flash drives on it. and that works just fine. I simply have not been able to get an XP bootable install image to load and be bootable on the stick. I can get the files on the stick without any problems by many different methods but so far I have had no luck making the stick bootable and starting the XP setup process. I can and have booted a Win 7 setup from usb flash drive and it ran fine Im just not sure this machine wont choke on Win 7 Since it is several years old and only has just over 1 gig of ram. But the machine can boot from usb.

 

[tomatthe]

I have not tried this, but this looks like a pretty nicely down tutorial.

Maybe give it a try,

http://liliputing.com/2009/08/easiest-way-to-install-windows-on-a-netbook-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html

 

[tron1062]

Thanks! This looks like just the ticket. I am not a rank amature but I couldnt believe how impossible of a task this seemed to be. I even know my way around DOS and I still was not able to find a way to get the stick bootable in any system that would load the WinXP setup. I will update this after I try the boot / install when the app gets done creating the boot image on my flash drive.

 

[tron1062]

Best answer selected by tron1062.

 

[tron1062]

Just what I needed Thanks! For anyone else looking to boot an XP setup from USB the answer is to get and run Win To Flash from Novicorp http://wintoflash.com/ This works for all versions of Windows from 2000 and later from what I can tell... including Win 7 and Win 8 but those have easy official tools its the earlier OS's that this is perfect for.

Thanks Tomatthe for pointing me in the right direction finally after nearly a week of banging my head against one wall after another!

Check out the Link for the turorial below if you have questions about this process it was very informative as well.

T.

I have not tried this, but this looks like a pretty nicely down tutorial.

Maybe give it a try,

http://liliputing.com/2009/08/easiest-way-to-install-windows-on-a-netbook-with-a-usb-flash-drive.html