Help required installing XP on a Portege R200

Sijo45

Sijo45

Sijo45

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24 Apr 2006
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High Wycombe
Hi All

I've had my little Toshiba Portege R200 for about 3 years and the installation of XP is REALLY chugging. It doesn't have a built in CD drive so I have been trying to work out how to reinstall Windows.

My brother has a USB CD drive, which belongs to his HP laptop, but my laptop won't recognise it so that attempt failed. Also tried to put the Windows CD on a USB stick and boot from that, but it won't boot from it.

My final thought is partitioning the disk and putting the XP cd on there. Does anyone know if this is a viable way of installing Windows?

Anyone got any other ideas of ways I could do it?

My last ditch effort would be to connect the hard drive to my desktop, but I am loathe to do that as it has a 1.8" ZIF HDD and I have heard they are very fragile, not to mention I don't have the necessary IDE adaptor!

Any help greatly appreciated :)
 

CaptainCrash

CaptainCrash

CaptainCrash

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Sijo45 said:
My brother has a USB CD drive, which belongs to his HP laptop, but my laptop won't recognise it so that attempt failed. Also tried to put the Windows CD on a USB stick and boot from that, but it won't boot from it.

My final thought is partitioning the disk and putting the XP cd on there. Does anyone know if this is a viable way of installing Windows?

Anyone got any other ideas of ways I could do it?
Click to expand...
Sorry if it's stating the obvious, but was the USB stick actually bootable? (simply copying the XP installation folders over isn't enough)

XP *can* be installed from a flash drive, but it's not as simple as Vista or 7 - eg have a look here or here. There may also be compatability issues between particular USB drives and particular mobos, some combinations just can't be made to boot whatever you do with them, so there might be some trial and error involved.

It's possible to install XP from a HDD partition, but you'll still need something to boot from, so it doesn't really get you anywhere unfortunately, unless PXE network booting/installation is an option (doubtful).
 
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