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I'm having trouble installing Windows XP on a computer...

My friend gave me her old computer, it was riddled with viruses and ran extremely slow. I did my best to clean it out, and after a bit I discovered it had a boot sector virus. So I downloaded the Ultimate Boot CD (installed it on a flash drive), and ran Darik's nuke and boot to completely wipe the hard drive.

I then tried to reinstall Windows XP from a USB drive... It doesn't work. The computer just stalls and never boots. The computers dvd drive doesn't work, so I borrowed a spare drive that another friend had, and tried to run a Windows XP cd. For a bit I got the stop 7B error, but now it just stalls like the USB drive does.

Since then I've booted back into the Ultimate Boot CD, and ran partition magic. Repartitioned the Hard Drive, and copied the files on the Windows cd to the hard drive. I was wondering if there is any way I can make it run the setup.exe off the hard drive. I have the UBCD at my disposal, but have yet to come up with a way to do it.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

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  • I booted up to DOS, and tried to run the setup.exe. It says this program cannot be run in DOS. Dec 31, 2010 at 3:27

2 Answers 2

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Your best chance of running the installer off the drive is to boot into an older version of Windows (e.g. 95, 98 or 2000), and running the installer.

Bear in mind that you don't need a full version of Windows - just a system diskette to get the machine running.


As an aside, don't forget that you'll need an OS that sees NTFS if that's how you formatted your drive, in which case you could possibly go back to FAT32 to use my suggested method.

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  • @Moab - correct, as I pointed out in my Aside below.
    – user3463
    Dec 31, 2010 at 3:00
  • I have the format in FAT32 Dec 31, 2010 at 3:31
  • Ok, I finally made headway! I booted it to DOS, but couldn't quite get the file to run. So I looked on the internet, and stumbled on this page: support.microsoft.com/kb/307848 I followed the directions, and it has started installing. Thank you for the help! Dec 31, 2010 at 3:39
  • Fantastic to hear! I'm going to miss the floppy disk when it goes.
    – user3463
    Dec 31, 2010 at 4:17
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You might be able to with a basic build of a Bart PE boot disk.

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

.

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  • I was going to suggest a PE tool, but I'm not familiar enough with them to answer confidently. I'm giving you a +1.
    – user3463
    Dec 31, 2010 at 3:01

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