WinXP Home Install Question????

[Fisher999]

Hey guys (and gals):

I'll be installing WinXP Home (on a clean HD) for the first time.
On several Win98SE and WinME machines I've built, I partitioned the drive, formatted with FAT32, then copied the Win98SE/ME
setup files to the hard drive and ran the installation from the hard drive rather than the CD.

Can this be done with WinXP Home?

If it can I have what MAY be a potential problem. I only have version 5.0 of Powerquest's Partitionmagic. This version came out just PRIOR to Win2k and does NOT support Win2k or XP's version 5 NTFS (only NTFS 4). There is an upgrade from 5 to 5.01 on Powerquest's site which is supposed to offer NTFS 5 support for Win2k and XP but the site won't let me download the upgrade....sooooo

Question: Can I partition the drive, format it with FAT32, copy the WinXP home setup files to the hard drive, then install XP and choose the option (that appears somewhere in the installation process) to convert the partition to an NTFS partition. Even if it allowed me to do this, will this somehow screw-up the WinXP setup files since they were copied to the hard drive on a FAT32 partition???

Thanks for your input....

Greg 😱

 

[AndyHui]

Boot from the WinXP CD....it will give you the option to partition and format within the installation itself without anything being required on the hard drive.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

Andy is right. fyi....This is the same with XP home and pro, as well as win2k pro, server, and enterprise server.

You no longer have the 4GB ntfs partitioning problems of old days past that NT 4 has/had. You can make massive NTFS partitions on install without any re-sizing/converting.