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Installing WinXP off of a USB flash drive?

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pookguy88

Golden Member
Is it possible to boot my laptop off my flash drive (with windows xp loaded on it) and install a fresh copy of windows off of it??

if so, can anyone tell me how and/or have any links?? thanks
 
if the drive booted from the boot image of the windows xp cd, or booted to a dos enviroment and you ran the winnt.exe in the i386 folder, i don't see why not. It the USB one of the boot devices set in the bios?
 
i'm not sure, i'll have to check at home..
so basically just put an image of windows xp cd on there??
does that make it bootable?? i think USB is one of the boot devices, i have an ibm x40 so i'm assuming so
 
It may be faster to copy the contents of the usb drive to the hdd. It's nice to have a copy of the I386 folder on there anyway, so you're never asked for it. Just edit this HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup once you're setup to point to it. Then you can run repair, system file checker, reinstall, etc w/o anything else.
 
madthumbs - or anyone else - once I got to that path in REGEDIT, I couldn't figure out which entry to change. Also, what if the I386 modules get out of date? i.e. fixes that WINDOWSUPDATE makes replaces some modules, then you'll have the old modules in that I386 folder. How does this work?
 
source path; should be something like d:\, can change it to c:\ if c is where I386 is. The I386 folder is gonna be just like your original disk as far as windows is concerned. The updates are kept track of in the same spot in the registry. Just be sure that you don't change the i386 contents because if you replace an original disk with an spX integrated for example, it will not recognize it as your installation disk. SP integrated works differently from windows update to service packs. When you update, they're uninstallable and modifications can require the original disk contents. With integrated, changes will need the integrated's disk and the service pack is not uninstallable.
 
Um, isn't this a good way to kill a flash drive?

Seeing as they have limited read/write cycle lifetimes...
 
Wtf??? Limited read cycles?
What kind of cheap flash are you talking about...

Doesn't most M-sys stuff have unlimited reads and 5 million writes?
 
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