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Need some XP creativity... Installing Windows XP on an old computer that does not support 32GB+ drives on a 120GB drive

B

brxndxn

Diamond Member
Okay, I'm upgrading the hard drive for a friend of mine. She has a BookPC that I tweaked the hell out of - it doesn't support any processor faster than 550mhz, except I managed to get a 600mhz celeron to run at 800mhz on it.

Anyway, I download IBM's dynamic drive overlay utility and installed it on the 120GB hard drive. I set it to clip (software clip) at 32gb to fool the bios so that the computer can see a boot image on it. This allows the computer to access all 120gb of the drive, just the bios will not lock up when trying to boot from it. Except, I have to boot only from the drive and I want to install xp on it.

To do this, it created a 2.1gb FAT16 partition. I was thinking (so I didn't have to bother with cdrom drivers) that I could use a cd-boot floppy disk, copy the I386 directory over to the C: (2.1gb FAT16 drive), and then run winnt.exe (XP setup) off of the C: drive.

Am I going to run into any problems? Assume I know how to xcopy /e /h correctly and everything has worked from there.

Also, are there any other ideas of how to get this to work? I heard Windows XP does not need dynamic drive overlay. However, the bios locks up if I leave the drive configured as a 120gb drive. And, if I choose 'NONE' in the 'standard' part of the bios, there is no way that Windows XP will be able to boot from that drive.

Please do not tell me that it cannot be done, because I will eventually do it.. I've been just running into problems left and right and this is the only way I think it will work. There might be something I'm overlooking, though.

Here's a list of a few things I've tried:

- Windows XP 6-disk boot setup - fails at hal.dll
- Booting directly from XP cd without DDO installed on drive - locks up while formatting disk
 
Why mess with all that overlay crap and all the hassles if something goes wrong, when a <$25. shipped adapter (Syba from Newegg, dealsonic et al.) will do the job 100x better?
.bh.

:moon:
 
I thought most book PCs have at least one PCI slot. If it has a modem or something in it, figure out a way to move that out - external modem (can be had for less than $20. now), whatever. I would do almost anything to avoid using an overlay on a HD...
.bh.
 
The overclock is perfectly stable. XP was running fine on a 20GB hard drive for months before we decided to upgrade the hard drive. There is no point in removing the overclock.

There is no PCI slot.

This is a tough issue.. BTW, everything I originally said I was going to try did not work. I'm now gonna try telling the bios 'none' as far as hard drives concern and install xp on it anyway and see what happens.
 
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