XP on a flash drive.

[stidham]

I've been getting a few netbooks in lately that either have had a bad hard drive or in 1 case, I thought it was a bad hard drive. I pulled it out and connected it to my bench machine, I just appeared to be blank, no partition, nothing. In that case there was no recovery partition to recover from. I used a cd drive I had lying around to connect via USB to reinstall XP from. I've looked all over the place and found to 'guides' on how to create a bootable flashdrive with XP on it. None of them worked for me. I thought I turned to gurus here for help.

Thanks.

 

[dogskool]

This allows you to put xp on a flash drive, although it's not for installing xp:

http://www.zinstall.com/products/zinstall-zpod

 

[cyabro]

I use winsetupfromUSB.

With that you can actually have more than one O/S installation files on the same USB stick, if it has enough space.
I've made up a USB stick with XP Home, XP Pro and XP MCE on one USB stick.

You boot from the USB stick and select which version you want to install.
After it's gone through the first DOS install part and reboots you boot off the USB stick again and it use the menu option for the second part of the installation..

 

[gazza]

Mate, save yourself the heartache and get a Zalman VE300 portable drive, comes with a virtual CD/DVD that allows you to boot any bootable ISO image. Simply copy the WinXP iso to the .ISO folder and then select the it to boot. Best investment you will make all year!

 

[altrenda]

Zalmans a great tool , but if you've got a spare 4 gig USB drive, try this
http://wintoflash.com/home/en/

There are many ways to do this, this is one of them.

 

[stidham]

Thanks guys. I'll try these out over the weekend. I knew this was the place to come for answers. I'm going to check out the Zalman VE300 too.

 

[Rosco]

copy all the files to a blank usb drive... that it... it will boot... no extra tools easy peasy

 

[colonydata]

copy all the files to a blank usb drive... that it... it will boot... no extra tools easy peasy

Windows vista and 7 will, xp it's not that simple.

 

[Rosco]

Windows vista and 7 will, xp it's not that simple.

oooo sorry never needed to do it with xp... thats good to know! ^+1

 

[stidham]

Thanks guys. That worked like a charm. I now have an AIO jump drive of XP and one of Win 7.