Completely Formatting a drive before XP.

I like to format my HDD clean as a bee, then on restart I get the “NO OS FOUND” error. I am expecting it anyway. My typical way of getting XP back was to go through a painful process of OS upgrades, 2000 > XP, even 95>2000>XP, it isn’t clean but it works.

Then I found out I can just use a Win98 startup disc to access my CD drive, then navigate the XP disc to:
And it begins the installation of a fresh WinXP on the drive.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278104

I have since done this on 16 notebooks with out problem, family notebooks and friends and such.

The only problem I face is the slim notebooks that don’t have a floppy. Has anyone else had success with this 278104KB method? It works perfectly and it seems none of the sites aimed to help never ever talk about this way of installing XP fresh.

 

I have never try that, but as far as the way I have been doing it, I just set the BIOS to boot from optical drive, and boot the machine with the XP CD in it. Works like a charm every time.

 

so you say you try use xp upgrade disc you know it still bootable cd all need to provide proof previos product and use it install no need upgrade 98 to 2000 to xp

 

I don't understand... I faintly recall doing this years ago, when some CDROM drives weren't natively bootable and required special instruction to be used... But I haven't seen a CD drive like that in years... What is the point?

 

For whatever reason some drives do fail to boot (even new laptops).
I like the startup 98 disc – then install via my above to work 100%, I was just curious if anyone had taken advantage of that for XP installs on a totally bare drive.

 

I understand that sure, I suppose I should have tabled my Q better.
Even new PC’s sometimes wont boot from their cddrive, the net is littered with users who for whatever reason cannot get the cdrom to boot (even with a bios setting).

I have been finding it is the notebooks (possibly desks too) that have a new cdrom/dvdrom etc installed appear to be affected most by this, -it’s fix apparently seems to be jumper settings improperly set.

 

I've never had to do that with XP. Never heard of the issue. I'm trying to think back to when I might have had to do that... Possibly with Windows 2000 using old cd drives & BIOS's...

I was under the impression that the XP installation doesn't rely on a DOS driver to load the CDROM drive, so it isn't needed.

 

No, I specifically mean a blank HDD (NO OS) one partition for the whole thing.
Upon reboot the error “No OS found” is given, you are familiar with that though correct?

Now occasionally in this realm a CD wont boot, I come across it often enough to have scoured a fix.
I was totally surprised to find the KB article some months back.

You are correct regarding XP not needing any virtual or dos drivers to boot.
What I mean is the physical CD drive sometimes will NOT boot, not at all.
I am up late this evening doing a Toshiba M70 the above way. Why the drive didn’t want to boot is beyond my expertise, but all the settings in cmos/bios tell it to boot first – but it wont.
it didn’t even want to eat the factory recovery XP before I even began the format.

Crazy but true.

 

I know what you mean . I've installed XP literally hundred of times on many computers (I make somewhat of a living toying with computers). I have just never encountered this problem with recent hardware & XP. I usually DBAN the drive, so I understand that there is nothing there.

Perhaps the problem is related to drives which were set by the factory to be secondary, not primary IDE. I suppose that could cause a problem in some cases.

EDIT: My reason for mentioning DOS was because in my experience the only reason for using a 98 CD was to force the CD drive to load via the DOS emulated within the install CD.