Can I Install Windows XP Pro from a Hard Drive, or a HDD Partition?

Question

My Laptops CD Drive sucks. It scratches up disks just for running them in it so I use a External Drive. I screwed up my External and totaled 2 CD-RW Drives as well and they even smell like burning.

So could I extract the Windows CDs contents using nLite, or other software into my external HDD and make the laptop boot-up on the external Hard Drive which isn't screwed?

Answer 1

No

Answer 2

You must understand something that you will never be able to boot up from your external hard drive unless you have copied all the files and if you wish to start from external drive then the chances are slim as you need to get to desktop before installing the OS. What I suggest to you is that you use another machine and try to retrieve the data and make sure that all the data have been copied and then create a bootable CD and then you can boot up from here. But before that don't forget to get to BIOS and change the boot-up device to CD-ROM. Try this.

Answer 3

You can copy the CD contents using DOS into it's own folder then run the setup program.

Boot to a Windows startup disk with the file xcopy.com on it.

You have to make sure you copy all the subfolders as well, so type xcopy /? at the command prompt for a list of extensions.

Answer 4

you want to initalise the disk first that you'll format it. To do good the following you want to be the Administrator or have Administrator priviledges on your person account. Open: administration Panel > Administrative equipment > laptop administration then open: storage > Disk administration the recent disk will be listed mutually with your modern-day disks, named something like Disk 0, Disk a million, Disk 2 etc. purely good click on the call and choose initialise or initialise disk. on the white area next to it good click and choose partition or new partition. keep on with the teachings of the wizard. the most suitable step will be to format the partition.

Answer 5

You can. I can give you a link that deals with hard drive problems.
Some RAM/hard drive problems can be easily fixed yourself by using easily available tools. I found the info at http://fixit.in useful. Try this site, if you can get what is required.