Installing Windows XP on the x61 - no CD/DVD drive

Has anyone been able to install Windows XP on the x61 without using an optical drive? I've read MANY guides around the internet, but they were no help. Has anyone actually been able to do this?! Any help is much appreciated~

-Kuya

 

Take out the internal hard drive and connect it to another computer. Make the internal hard drive bootable and copy the windows xp installation files to the internal hard drive. Put the internal hard drive back into the X61 and start the Windows XP installation manually from the internal hard drive.

 

I read some where , You can copy xp on a flash drive, boot from that usb flash drive , and load xp on your HD. I tried this, but the window does not see my SATA HD. Oh well!

 

You didn't configure your USB Windows configuration right, make sure you did it correctly!

 

I connected the Laptop HDD to my desktop PC and installed wondows. Then, I took the Laptop HDD and put it back in my laptop, but it won't boot. I changed SATA settings in BIOS to "Compatibility" - no help - and I checked and rechecked the boot order - no help. Anyone have any ideas? =[

Thanks.

-Kuya

 

You didn't activate it while the HDD was attached to the desktop did you...?

 

To make the drive bootable, it is not sufficient just to adjust the boot order on the notebook. You need to prep the drive to be bootable.

1. Download a Windows 98SE bootdisk from www.bootdisk.com and create a bootable floppy

2. Connect the internal hard drive to your desktop computer and disconnect all other hard drives from the desktop computer (this is an important precaution)

3. Boot from the floppy and once DOS is loaded executed the command “SYS X:”, where X corresponds to the drive letter that your internal hard drive has been enumerated with. (if the drive is unformatted, you may need to format it first. Remember that you do not want any other hard drive connected to your desktop computer at the time you are doing these operations. If you are unlucky you might mistake the drive letter of your internal harddrive for the harddrive of the desktop computer and you really do not want that)

4. If everything has gone according to plan, your internal hard drive should now be bootable. Shut down the desktop computer and then reconnect the desktop hard drives.

5. Copy the i386 folder from the Windows XP installation disk to the internal hard drive (if you have not already done that).

6. Return the internal hard drive to your notebook. Make sure that SATA mode is set to compatibility in BIOS

7. If everything has worked, your notebook should boot into DOS.

8. Change folder to i386 by executing “CD C:\I386”

9. Start Windows XP Installation executing “WINNT.EXE”

Hope this helps.

 

or you can buy an external dvd at Best Buy and return it after installing

 

If you actually install XP on your laptop drive while it's in another computer, XP's HAL (hardware abstraction layer) will be set up for all the motherboard devices on the desktop computer. When you then place the laptop drive back in your laptop and try to boot, a long string of MB devices have been set up in XP for a completely different MB. XP should be installed on the HD while it's in the computer it's going to run in.

Quinn

 

Ah... that makes sense, haven't done all this in a while.

P.S. Thanx for all the help guys~!

 

Going to try this later tonight, thanks for typing all that out~!

-Kuya

 

DOS does not support SATA HDD's apparently... unfortunately the HDD from my x61 is SATA. Any thoughts?

-Kuya

 

did you set AHCI to compatibility?

 

If you change to compatibility mode in BIOS it should work.

 

There is no compatibility mode in my desktop BIOS, only on the laptop BIOS. =[

-Kuya

 

I gave up and bought an external DVD Burner from these guys:

http://www.centrix-intl.com/list.asp?CategoryID=6

-Kuya