What is Smart Drive and Where Can I Download It

[hackmole]

I'm probably doing something completely wrong but when I install Windows 2000 Pro, it won't install directly from my CD so I have to go to the I386 folder on the CD and start Winnt.exe which copies the files to the C drive and takes about an hour and thirty minutes to do so. It tells me that this would be a lot more efficient if I had Smart Drive. What is Smart Drive and where can I download it.

 

[mikecel79]

Your machine won't boot off the CD? There's a utility on the Win2k CD called Makedisk that will create 4 floppy disks that you can boot off and then install from the CD.

SmartDrive is a Microsoft program that came with DOS and Win95 (possibly 98 and ME too) that was used for caching. It would cache information to memory from a drive so you could read it back faster.

 

[SearchMaster]

If you have a Win98 machine, you should be able to find smartdrv.exe there. And I've done exactly what you describe - smartdrv will cut your install time dramatically (90 minutes -> 10 minutes).

 

[htne]

If it were me, I would spend a few minutes trying to figure out why I couldn't install from the CD. Your Win2k installation CD should be bootable. If your PC will not boot from this CD, go into CMOS setup and check the boot order. I normally use:

1) floppy
2) CDROM
3) IDE-0

 

[SearchMaster]

Mine was an MSDN CD that was non-bootable. It's possible his is as well.

BTW, I used this link to make my CD bootable. I also slipstreamed SP4 into it.