Making an Windows XP ISO, then installing

Can you install a new OS by using mounted ISO's?
I have two harddrives, I'm thinking of reformating my bulk one and installing XP on it rather than have XP install on my small drive.

I was thinking it might work because the drive I am reformatting is not the one with the mounter and the Iso image.

Can anyone confirm this?

Once the computer reboots during the install it won't be able to see the drive, thus it will fail. Just burn it and get it done with, cd's cost next to nothing.

or make a ghost of your machine less time involved, or if you want to get more critical on your installs arconis lets you do drive imaging for all machines i belive (where its not machine specific)

also, you have the option of a unattended install which i love i've got a ton of crap installed on startup (ventrillio, office, win RAR, defender, WMP11, net 2.0, uhh ... just about anything with silent switches) also, i have other things slipped into my cd including 8000000 windows updates

It is actually quite possible, although it requires that the iso be a seperate partition/hdd than the one you are install Windows on and it involes install GRUB as your bootloader to be able to load the ISO file.

Easier to burn the cd but not all that more difficult to learn and use GRUB.

This method is used sometimes for installing a differnt linux distro form inside another, with only 1 reboot..since GRUB is already installed with linux by default.

Please elaborate more with GRUB, and perhaps a website that explains it?

Rozal said:

Please elaborate more with GRUB, and perhaps a website that explains it?

Click to expand...

Download Grub4DOS
http://download.gna.org/grub4dos/

follow install instruction here:
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/wik...he_Windows_NT.2F2000.2FXP.2F2003_boot_manager

I just had the website for loading an iso in GRub. Let me go google it again.



actually, take a look here,
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-567485.html?sid=088b1154e3d2e0c867124526e77fa93c

You can follow that guide except replace gentoo.iso with your XP iso file

Oh and when your done installing, remeber to delete the line from boot.ini or else grub will load everytime.

Thanks alot!

you want 2 xp installs? or you want to transfer your current install to the new drive?