[serious] Booting from CD on old laptop [resolved]

[Acidic]

I am trying to boot from a CD on an old laptop to install WinXP. The HDD is newly formatted, but it won't load the CD when I have it in the drive and boot up the thing. BIOS never gives an option to choose my medium to boot from, so I think I have to have a disk which makes the thing load the files from the CD. How can I do this? Where can I get the files to put on the disk?
I need this done fairly quickly, so any help would be nice.

[wossname]

Why not boot off a floppy instead and then access the CD through dos?

Disc 1 from any dos setup will act as a boot disk.


Or it could be Transient Component Fatigue

[wossname]

HANG ON!!

*finally gets brain in gear*

If a laptop is so old that its BIOS doesn't have a boot sequence option then what makes you think it will be able to run XP?

[Acidic]

It's had XP on it beforehand.

I'm actually booting into DOS now. I've realised I can't install XP from there though, so I'm putting on 98, then going to upgrade.

fantastic, says:
Please wait while setup intiializes.
Scanning system registry...
Windows Setup requires 7340032

Then stands still not doing anything.

edit: did same again, now it says more
...32 bytes available on your C drive.

The HDD is larger than that, obviously. Not sure what's going on.
The disk creates a virtual D drive, which is roughly 1.4MB
When I type c:, that works
ten I try dir and I get:
Invalid media type reading drive C
Abort, Retry, Fail?

That would make me think it's partitioning problems. So I run fdisk and view the info, it says there a 6189MB Primary DOS partition on C drive. So I have no idea what's going on now.

[Merri]

Oh, I could even give a tip on how to make a bootable XP disc. There are instructions on the web on how to do this. You can even find the Microsoft corporation.img downloadable off the web, so you don't need to worry about it (yeah, it is the thing that makes the cd bootable). You'll also need a proper burning software... it is a bit of hassle, but can be done.

Sorry, not looking for the info for now... can't remember the url or the keywords that get you to the article directly.

[IntelSucks]

you just make an me boot disk in xp. you cant just type setup(.exe) like the good ol' days, you gotta cd to i386 dir and type "setup".

[dglienna]

use a 98 diskette, boot, and run FDISK. then format the disk, and then boot to the diskette with CD support. Then, run setup off of the CD. If the installation files won't fit, then you won't be able to install XP. Sounds like the wrong size disk may be seen by BIOS.

[Acidic]

I didn't know you had to go to i386. I'll try that out. Otherwise we'll just send it to the propper shop to get things done.

[alex_read]

dglienna's suggestion is spot on, leave the suggestion of the XP boot disk & re-create the partition, fomat & install.

[IntelSucks]

Originally posted by Acidic
I didn't know you had to go to i386. I'll try that out. Otherwise we'll just send it to the propper shop to get things done.

Thats how I have always used to do it. Of course now, I Just boot from cd. Floppy is obsolete.

[Acidic]

Originally posted by alex_read
dglienna's suggestion is spot on, leave the suggestion of the XP boot disk & re-create the partition, fomat & install.

I had somehow forgotten to format after partitionaing. 98 is installing now, then I'll shove on XP. I think 98 won't give any problems. Thank you all.

[Merri]

Yup, for me, floppy is obsolete unless I'm setupping some older computer. Two of my latest desktop computers have been without a floppy drive and so is my laptop. I've burned myself an SP2 enabled bootable WinXP Pro disk. Reduces installation time a lot to have it in the setup files.

[Acidic]

Normally I use my mp3 player for all the small file copying things. But this was an old laptop, so disks had to be used. I don't actually have any disks, so I had to borrow them.

Anyways, it's all sorted out now. Thanks for all the help.