Help Installing XP Onto Old Laptop

PeteHerts

Hello everyone.

My cousin bought an old laptop for her daughter that only had a 4GB hard drive with XP on it. When I tried to update the system with Windows updates there wasn't enough space so I bought a 20GB hard drive off Ebay. When it arrived it had a message saying "These drives are RAW formatted: this means there is NO active partition; to do this you must initialise this drive in windows manager. Please ensure you do this first." I'm not sure what that means to be honest.
I've tried to put XP on the laptop but everytime I try I get a message saying "Operating system not found". I've made sure the CD drive is the first to boot but with no luck.
Any help would be appreciated please.
Many thanks in advance.
Pete

Donnie

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/advanced/ntfs.mspx

PeteHerts

Donnie wrote: »

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/advanced/ntfs.mspx

Thanks for the link Donnie but is there another way of getting the hard drive into a usable state for installing XP other that buying an adaptor of some sort and then using another computer to initialise it?

Donnie

Adaptor? Have you placed the HDD in the PC? No need for anything extra.

How to Use Computer Management on the Local Computer
NOTE: You must be logged on as Administrator or as a member of the Administrators group view and modify most properties and perform most computer-management tasks.

To start and use Computer Management on the local computer: 1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel. Click Performance and Maintenance, click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.

The Computer Management window for the local computer is displayed. "Computer Management (Local)" is displayed at the root of the console tree.
2. In the console tree, expand System Tools, Storage, or Services and Applications to view the tools and services in each of these containers.
3. Click the item that you want (for example, Event Viewer) to use the tool, and then view the information that is associated with it.

gjchester

Donnie wrote: »

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/advanced/ntfs.mspx

That probably won't help on a laptop as the drive can't be put in as a secondary drive as laptops usually only support one hard drive.
You'll need to either get a drive adapter to put it in a standard PC or put it on a USB adapter to get to it that way.

You don't say what CD is in the CD Drive, the CD has to be bootable too. Operating systems CD's usually are bootable but backups and restore [EMAIL="CD'@s"]CD's[/EMAIL] may not be. If it has a floppy use somethere like bootdisk.com to make a DOS boot disk to format the drive. If you have access to a CD writer on a system thats conected o the web look at http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/ and downlaod that that will at least allow you to format the drive.
However both these will only format the drive, you need a bootable OS CD to put the operating system back on, it's not as simple as just moving the files over.

If you have it and a CD or DVD writer you may be able to use something like Ghost to back the working drive up and then swap and restore the image to the new drive. There are freeware ghost tryp programs but I've no experience of using them, If you want ghost try your local PCworld, they did there PC Back Up software for 97p to clear it and in realiity it was ghost 10. Take a look at http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=418&page=1 for ideas on disk cloning

PeteHerts

Thanks for the advice guys.
I've tried Ultimatebootcd in ISO and extracted format, burning with windows, but still no luck so I'll have to get an adaptor.

Donnie

What was I thinking?

gjchester is right.

gjchester

What CD do you have? Even if you format the hard drive via an adapter (Ebay item 13026748638 would do) in another PC if CD you have is is not bootable you still won't be able to put windows on the machine.

Actually pondering it format the hard drive with FAT32, move the system files over and make the partition active, and copy the i386 directory (which may or may not exist depends as I said if it's a backup or a install disk) from the windows CD over.

You should be able to do that off a Boot Floppy or CD to the newly installed Hard drive. You also need to run smartdrv.exe before the next step or it will take eons to setup XP.

Then run assuming you can boot to the c:\ prompt go to the i386 and run winnt.exe and it should install XP.

Easy when you know how...