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SOLVED [Q]Installing an OS from within an OS?

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Mario1

Grammer, its my favoriate thing
Joined
Nov 14, 2009
Location
Pleven, Bulgaria
Okay my English sucks so you probably didn't get what I mean when you saw the title, so let me explain:
I have 2 HDDs, Windows 7 is running on the primary one (and old ATA Hitachi HDD), the 2nd one is currently being used for movies & music.
My PC doesn't have a CD/DVD drive, since I tore it apart and made a burning laser from the laser diode itself.
So yeah anyways, lets get to the point, shall we?
I want to install Windows XP on the 2nd HDD.
I'm looking for some kind of software that will help me do that without me having to actually restart my PC and boot up from some kind of a data source (e.g - DVD ROM/flash drive).
Is that possible?
 
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I would say no for XP. I've mounted an ISO of Win 7 and installed it that way a couple times, so I know that works, but I don't think it will work for XP. You could give it a try and see if it works. This is what I mount the ISOs with.
 
I would say no for XP. I've mounted an ISO of Win 7 and installed it that way a couple times, so I know that works, but I don't think it will work for XP. You could give it a try and see if it works. This is what I mount the ISOs with.
Uhm yeah I have Daemon Tools on my PC, it basically does the same thing.
Anyways mounting is a no-go for XP, you can mount it, but you can't install it that way, it must be done off a CD/DVD/flash drive.
Thanks for trying to help tho, its much appreciated! :thup:
 
You can use VMWare Player or Workstation (can't remember if Player has this feature, but Workstation does; free 30 day trial) to create a virtual machine with direct access to the physical hard drive. The 'Add hardware' wizard given when you add a hard drive should have an option call 'Use a physical disk (for advanced users)'; choose this option and point it to your second slaved hard drive. I'm assuming you have an ISO of XP; boot to it and you'll run through the OS install process in the virtual machine running on your Win7 install.
 
You can use VMWare Player or Workstation (can't remember if Player has this feature, but Workstation does; free 30 day trial) to create a virtual machine with direct access to the physical hard drive. The 'Add hardware' wizard given when you add a hard drive should have an option call 'Use a physical disk (for advanced users)'; choose this option and point it to your second slaved hard drive. I'm assuming you have an ISO of XP; boot to it and you'll run through the OS install process in the virtual machine running on your Win7 install.
This could work, I will try it out and let you guys know how it went, thanks! :attn:
 
You can use VMWare Player or Workstation (can't remember if Player has this feature, but Workstation does; free 30 day trial) to create a virtual machine with direct access to the physical hard drive. The 'Add hardware' wizard given when you add a hard drive should have an option call 'Use a physical disk (for advanced users)'; choose this option and point it to your second slaved hard drive. I'm assuming you have an ISO of XP; boot to it and you'll run through the OS install process in the virtual machine running on your Win7 install.

Sadly it didn't work.
Everything went fine, even booted up the OS in VMWare, but when I tried booting from that HDD after POST screen I got a BSOD (couldn't read anything, it lasted 0,5 sec) and the PC restarted. :(
 
Just thought of something, why not use Windows 7 built in Virtual Machine for XP? Unless you want to game on XP or something that won't work in a virtual environment.
 
Just thought of something, why not use Windows 7 built in Virtual Machine for XP? Unless you want to game on XP or something that won't work in a virtual environment.
I don't want Windows 7, I don't want to game, I don't wanna do anything that has to do with Windows 7 for that matter.
I wanna install Win XP on the 2nd HDD, boot off it and format my currrent one.
 
Sadly it didn't work.
Everything went fine, even booted up the OS in VMWare, but when I tried booting from that HDD after POST screen I got a BSOD (couldn't read anything, it lasted 0,5 sec) and the PC restarted. :(

Hmm, probably due to the different hardware in the VM.

Try re-installing XP on the drive via the VM again, only this time, the very first time it prompts to reboot (it will still be in the 8-bit color environment that says 'Copying neccessary file to disk' or something like that; it'll have a red countdown ribbon that says rebooting in 10 seconds or something), shut the VM down and boot your system to the 2nd hard drive. The XP install should resume on the bare-metal system and install the correct disk drivers.
 
Hmm, probably due to the different hardware in the VM.

Try re-installing XP on the drive via the VM again, only this time, the very first time it prompts to reboot (it will still be in the 8-bit color environment that says 'Copying neccessary file to disk' or something like that; it'll have a red countdown ribbon that says rebooting in 10 seconds or something), shut the VM down and boot your system to the 2nd hard drive. The XP install should resume on the bare-metal system and install the correct disk drivers.
Okay, will try that.
Thanks once again!
P.S Is it possible that the problem persists, because my XP doesn't have integrated SATA drivers (I assume it does, but I'm not quite sure) ?
 
Okay now vmware says "BOOTMGR is missing" even before I started installing anything (as soon as I power the virtual PC on).
 
Does your PC not have a USB port? Since Windows XP is a CD, any USB Flash drive over 500MB should work.

This program should let you create a WinXP installation USB: http://wintoflash.com/download/en/


For the information of anyone else reading this, for Windows 7 it would be:

Connect your USB Flash drive then type this in Windows 7/Vista DOS [Windows XP DOS cannot be used for this]:

• diskpart
• list disk
• select disk #
[of USB Flash drive]
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=NTFS quick
• assign
• exit


Now copy all contents of Windows 7 ISO to the USB Flash drive, then reboot and hold F8 (on most systems) to get a boot selection menu from which you can choose to boot from the newly created USB Flash Drive.

Optionally, delete autorun.inf (because autorun.inf files are now routinely intercepted by antivirus software.)
 
Does your PC not have a USB port? Since Windows XP is a CD, any USB Flash drive over 500MB should work.

This program should let you create a WinXP installation USB: http://wintoflash.com/download/en/


For the information of anyone else reading this, for Windows 7 it would be:

Connect your USB Flash drive then type this in Windows 7/Vista DOS [Windows XP DOS cannot be used for this]:

• diskpart
• list disk
• select disk #
[of USB Flash drive]
• clean
• create partition primary
• select partition 1
• active
• format fs=NTFS quick
• assign
• exit


Now copy all contents of Windows 7 ISO to the USB Flash drive, then reboot and hold F8 (on most systems) to get a boot selection menu from which you can choose to boot from the newly created USB Flash Drive.

Optionally, delete autorun.inf (because autorun.inf files are now routinely intercepted by antivirus software.)
I've only ran into problems when using WinToFlash. Like "NTLDR:Error 1 can't read XXXX" & etc. I can do it the harder way with MBRWiz (manually making the drive bootable, than copy the contents off the Win XP iso to the flash drive), but I'm literally sick of doing that procedure (done it 50 times already) so I'm trying to find a new method that will replace that one.
Sounds like your VM is trying to boot from the hard drive instead of the CD. The VM has a BIOS like a normal machine. Hit F2 when it's booting and change the boot order to boot from the CD drive/ISO first.
Will try that, hope it works.
EDIT:BSOD 0x0000007B (0xF7A31528, 0xC0000034, 0x0000000, 0x00000000)
 
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Hm, from the looks of it, that second hard drive could be going bad, or your SATA operation is set wrong. First, tell me what your SATA operation mode is currently set to in your systems BIOS. Then try changing it to something else like IDE and see if the second hard drive boots then.

Another possibility is that the old XP install was still present on the hard drive. Make sure you delete any partitions on the drive before installing XP via the VM again.
 
Hm, from the looks of it, that second hard drive could be going bad, or your SATA operation is set wrong. First, tell me what your SATA operation mode is currently set to in your systems BIOS. Then try changing it to something else like IDE and see if the second hard drive boots then.

Another possibility is that the old XP install was still present on the hard drive. Make sure you delete any partitions on the drive before installing XP via the VM again.
I've formatted the hard drive 5-6 times already. Tried quick format, slow format (had to wait a hour or so, which sucked) & etc, but nothing worked.
The only option my sh***y BIOS has, that has anything to do with SATA operation mode is set to Enhanced.
Enhanced is a SATA/PATA combination, the help thingy on the right said it means I'll be able to run SATA/PATA drives simultaneously.
More info (that you probably don't need):
IDE HDD (primary one that I run my current OS on) is set as master on ch0, SATA drive is slave on ch3.
 
Does anything different happen if you change that SATA setting to the other option? Also, make sure your second HDD is stable by running a DST with Western Digital Data Lifeguard (you can download it and run it on Win7).
Tested the HDD, everything is fine.
The HDD was ran like 13h in total since 2009 (when I bought it), since I was comfortable with my current HDD's size and didn't even bother connecting the SATA HDD to the PC.
Used it the 1st day of purchase for about 10-11h to test if everything works fine, other than that I haven't used it.
I've tried with all the options the SATA setting had, sadly with no success.
 
You are spending a huge amount of time on this. Which is OK if you like to tinker with this stuff. But paying a modest amount of money to a friend to use his CD drive for 30 minutes may be less expensive than days of your time?


But back to solving your problem as it is:
Make sure you have everything disconnected, other than one stick of ram and nothing attached to the computer at all. Make sure to not have AHCI turned on in BIOS. [Of course AHCI is better but we're trying to just get it installed.]

Make sure your system is not overclocked.

The thing is - I've had these kinds of problems on older systems when trying to install Windows XP from a CD - let alone without it.


So we don't really know if not having a CD is the only problem.
 
You are spending a huge amount of time on this. Which is OK if you like to tinker with this stuff. But paying a modest amount of money to a friend to use his CD drive for 30 minutes may be less expensive than days of your time?


But back to solving your problem as it is:
Make sure you have everything disconnected, other than one stick of ram and nothing attached to the computer at all. Make sure to not have AHCI turned on in BIOS. [Of course AHCI is better but we're trying to just get it installed.]

Make sure your system is not overclocked.

The thing is - I've had these kinds of problems on older systems when trying to install Windows XP from a CD - let alone without it.


So we don't really know if not having a CD is the only problem.
System isn't overclocked, I don't even have an option to enable/disable AHCI in BIOS and I'm only using 1 stick of RAM.
I've already installed the OS, but I get an instant BSOD upon booting (lasts 0,5s) than PC restarts.
No .dmp logs in the HDD that has Win XP installed on it so I can't even read the BSOD.
 
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