Loading Win 2K from hard drive?

[Bglad]

I have a laptop that I was having trouble getting Win 2K to load from CD so I formatted the drive, copied the Win2K folder to the drive then ran WinNT from the I386 folder.

It worked and everything is good now but it took around 2 hours to load. It went through a process for about two hours before it started the normal OS load.

1. What was it doing? Only thing I can figure is it was unpacking the .cab files.

2. Is there a step I missed that will make this faster next time?

Thx

 

[bozo1]

That's about normal since you didn't have smartdrive loaded. (Disk caching)
Load it from a DOS prompt next time before doing the install.

 

[Bglad]

Yes, it gave me an error and told me to run smart drive but I didn't know how. Can you explain?

Thx

 

[bozo1]

There might be a copy of it on the W2K CD - I can't remember. Usually, you use the version that comes with whatever version of DOS you are using to boot. In your config.sys, you need an entry device=himem.sys and in your autoexec.bat, just put a line that says smartdrv or you can just run smartdrv from your DOS prompt.

 

[Bglad]

Hmmm
I tried to run it from the I386 folder but it wasn't in there.

I ran a search here and on the web and couldn't find anything about this. Can anyone give me a link to more detailed instructions?

Thx a lot

 

[dakata24]

do a search for smartdrv.exe . you can do what bozo said to do with the autoexec.bat/config.sys.. all i did was copy it to my win98 bookdisk and run it manually at the dos prompt.