~~Alan~~ wrote:
> Until I can get to the store, I need to (re)install on a PC that, for
> the time being, does not have a working optical drive. How can I do
> this? I do have another PC to prepare and/or serve out the installation
> media.
>
> Thanks,
> ~alan
Take the hard drive to another PC.
Place two empty FAT32 partitions on it.
Copy the contents of the installer CD, to the second FAT32 partition.
(That is so the first partition will naturally become C: during installation.)
Now, move the drive back to the original computer.
Boot the original computer with an MSDOS diskette.
Change directory to the D:\i386 directory.
Run the installer. There is a "winnt.exe" and a
"winnt32.exe" file. One of those runs in DOS, while
the other would run in a Windows environment. Once you
start that program, the installer will then copy files
from the i386 folder of D:, as needed, to the empty C:
partition.
My current copy of WinXP was prepared in that way (just for fun).
I made the mistake once, of creating the partitions in the
wrong order, and my install ended up booting as D:. If you
create the partitions on the empty drive in order, the first
partition becomes your install partition, the second holds
the contents of the CD. So if you had an 80GB drive, you'd
make the first partition 78GB (for C
, and the install
partition could be the remaining 2GB. That leaves room for
you to store the contents of the CD, in the 2GB partition,
as well as load drivers, any other bits and pieces of software
you think you might require. Without a CD drive in the original
computer, you might not have any means of adding networking
drivers, chipset driver, video drivers and so on, to make a
workable system. Leaving 2GB of space for D:, gives you room to
throw in those goodies as well. For example, you may even want to
install your AV software, before connecting the computer to the
Internet for its first Windows Update.
The hardest part of that exercise, is making a decent MSDOS disk.
I wasted the better part of the day, tuning up a diskette to do that.
I started with an MSDOS diskette made in Win98. And added caching
to it, on the theory it would speed up the install. But by wasting
all day tuning it up, I didn't really gain anything by making the
"ultimate" MSDOS boot floppy. If you don't tune up MSDOS, you may
find the initial copy operation, from D: to C:, is rather slow.
But you can walk away from the computer until it is finished.
You can download an MSDOS diskette image from the Internet.
But I happened to have a trusty crusty one made in Win98 days.
If you want to spend the time tuning up the MSDOS floppy, I
got some info from this site to help me along the way.
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/
Once the installation is finished, if you want to make the first
partition NTFS instead of FAT32, there is a "convert" utility
in Windows, that can do that. The purpose of starting with two
FAT32 partitions, is so the (Win98) MSDOS environment can see
both partitions during the initial copy. Converting the first
partition to NTFS, means your crusty MSDOS floppy won't be
able to see the first partition any more.
There are various ways to format a large FAT32 partition. On your
preparation PC, the OS may not like to produce a FAT32 partition
bigger than 32GB. If that is the case, you can use this program.
If will handle a partition larger than 32GB. There are other
ways of doing this, but this is a direct solution to the problem.
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm
http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/download/fat32format.zip
The limits of FAT32 are listed here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat32#FAT32
"...limiting volume size to 2 TB on a hard disk with
512 byte sectors."
So in theory, you could start with a 2TB disk, and make
(almost) a 2TB first partition.
Good luck,
Paul