Hello,

I recently bought this Presario laptop that only has a removable floppy
drive (no DVD/CD drive). It has a 30gig hard drive with windows XP
already installed in the NTFS file format. There is also a small FAT
partition on this hard drive (d: drive) that has three directories,
i386, graphics and sound. The first being the install files for Windows
XP and the remaining two directories being drivers for this machine.

I am not sure on how to reinstall windows from this partition. Finding a
configuration manual on the HP/Compaq website is like trying to find
needle in a haystack. I did try to boot with a Win 98 boot floopy but
it only recognised the FAT partition and not the rest of the drive.
Anyone put me in the right direction?
Thanks Shane

If the I386 folder is complete (not all of them are), it has the setup
programs on it, Winnt.exe (the DOS setup program) and Winnt32.exe (the
Windows setup program). You could reinstall by running Winnt32 from
Windows, but it would not be a "clean" install.

Alternatively, boot from your Win 98 floppy and run Winnt.exe on what is
now the D: partition. That is the DOS setup program. One of it's
options is to reformat the install partition (C:), and doing so would
give you a clean install.

Although Windows 98's DOS boot disk doesn't access the C: partition,
Winnt run under it will.

There are other ways to skin this cat, you could boot from a DOS (Win98)
boot floppy that had support for some type of external storage device
(parallel port CD-ROM, PC Card CD-ROM, certain types of USB devices
(using a DOS USB driver such as DUSE), Jazz or other Iomega or Syquest
drives to which you had copied a Windows XP CD, etc. Or, you could boot
from a DOS (Win98) floppy that had network support and access a shared
CD-ROM drive or hard drive partition over the network. Finally, you
could pull the drive and perform some preliminary operations on another
computer, then reinstall the drive (since I386 is already on the drive,
however, that is probably not necessary).


nospam wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I recently bought this Presario laptop that only has a removable floppy
> drive (no DVD/CD drive). It has a 30gig hard drive with windows XP
> already installed in the NTFS file format. There is also a small FAT
> partition on this hard drive (d: drive) that has three directories,
> i386, graphics and sound. The first being the install files for Windows
> XP and the remaining two directories being drivers for this machine.
>
> I am not sure on how to reinstall windows from this partition. Finding a
> configuration manual on the HP/Compaq website is like trying to find
> needle in a haystack. I did try to boot with a Win 98 boot floopy but
> it only recognised the FAT partition and not the rest of the drive.
> Anyone put me in the right direction?
> Thanks Shane

Thanks Barry - some good info,

Shane

Barry Watzman wrote:
> If the I386 folder is complete (not all of them are), it has the setup
> programs on it, Winnt.exe (the DOS setup program) and Winnt32.exe (the
> Windows setup program). You could reinstall by running Winnt32 from
> Windows, but it would not be a "clean" install.
>
> Alternatively, boot from your Win 98 floppy and run Winnt.exe on what is
> now the D: partition. That is the DOS setup program. One of it's
> options is to reformat the install partition (C:), and doing so would
> give you a clean install.
>
> Although Windows 98's DOS boot disk doesn't access the C: partition,
> Winnt run under it will.
>
> There are other ways to skin this cat, you could boot from a DOS (Win98)
> boot floppy that had support for some type of external storage device
> (parallel port CD-ROM, PC Card CD-ROM, certain types of USB devices
> (using a DOS USB driver such as DUSE), Jazz or other Iomega or Syquest
> drives to which you had copied a Windows XP CD, etc. Or, you could boot
> from a DOS (Win98) floppy that had network support and access a shared
> CD-ROM drive or hard drive partition over the network. Finally, you
> could pull the drive and perform some preliminary operations on another
> computer, then reinstall the drive (since I386 is already on the drive,
> however, that is probably not necessary).
>
>
> nospam wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I recently bought this Presario laptop that only has a removable
>> floppy drive (no DVD/CD drive). It has a 30gig hard drive with
>> windows XP already installed in the NTFS file format. There is also a
>> small FAT partition on this hard drive (d: drive) that has three
>> directories, i386, graphics and sound. The first being the install
>> files for Windows XP and the remaining two directories being drivers
>> for this machine.
>>
>> I am not sure on how to reinstall windows from this partition. Finding
>> a configuration manual on the HP/Compaq website is like trying to find
>> needle in a haystack. I did try to boot with a Win 98 boot floopy but
>> it only recognised the FAT partition and not the rest of the drive.
>> Anyone put me in the right direction?
>> Thanks Shane