If your computer will not boot from your cd-rom while installing Windows XP you can just make one floppy instead of the six that Microsoft provides on their site.Recently I tried installing an OEM copy of XP on my laptop through a clean hard drive just fdisked and formatted,and could not get it to go.I didn't want to do an upgrade over,say, Win 98.

I do what I always do when I get stuck,1.)I panic and 2.) I take off on numerous searches so I can get unfrustrated.

I ran across an article whereby someone else was frustrated and knew of a solution and besides I would only have to use one floppy and not six as I also knew Microsoft had as a solution.

This worked like a charm,here it is; Use an existing floppy,Windows 98, Me (95 OSR2 might work) Startup floppy.Puy a copy of smartdrv.exe on the startup floppy.You should be able to find a copy on and existing Windows 9x/Me computer at C;windows.Be sure that if you format the floppy on a XP or 2000 machine with NTFS that you choose to make a dos start disk.I forgot to the first attempt and it wouldn't play along.

Load smartdrv.exe?
A:\>smartdrv.exe
?and run D:\i386\winnt.exe.

Make sure your cd is in the bay and you will be prompted from there,do not delete or reformat c:,winnt.exe will copy files to your HDD.

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