jecompton
August 13th, 2010, 04:55 PM
A friend came to me with an infested Dell. Typical popup in browser to fake antivirus program to virus cocktail infestation.
Since she didn't want to shell out $200 for Best Buy to deal with it, she came to me. I've done this a few times, and I just backup the important files, wipe the drive, and reinstall the OS from the CD. Unfortunately, when I got to the point where I would reinstall from the CD (or DVD in this case), it would not boot from it, and she told me the drive was broken--and it was.
So I wanted to try the challenge of making a usb flash drive that would function the same as the WinXP dvd. I thought it would be a simple matter of formatting a USB stick, setting it as bootable, making an .iso or pulling certain files off the WinXP disk, and putting them on the flash drive.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything online that really made it clear how to do all this. I formatted the flash drive and set it as bootable w/ fdisk no problem, and her BIOS does support booting from the drive, but I just couldn't do it.
I really wanted to do this without resorting to using Windows to do this task, but after a day's work, I was stuck. I finally just downloaded some typical tools like PEtoUSB or whatever and made the stupid thing. Now it works great, but I'm unhappy that I didn't learn anything from this.
Is it possible to make a flash drive from scratch (only a WinXP disk and linux) for installing Windows XP? Let me know if you have a checklist or some links I could read to learn this.
Since she didn't want to shell out $200 for Best Buy to deal with it, she came to me. I've done this a few times, and I just backup the important files, wipe the drive, and reinstall the OS from the CD. Unfortunately, when I got to the point where I would reinstall from the CD (or DVD in this case), it would not boot from it, and she told me the drive was broken--and it was.
So I wanted to try the challenge of making a usb flash drive that would function the same as the WinXP dvd. I thought it would be a simple matter of formatting a USB stick, setting it as bootable, making an .iso or pulling certain files off the WinXP disk, and putting them on the flash drive.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything online that really made it clear how to do all this. I formatted the flash drive and set it as bootable w/ fdisk no problem, and her BIOS does support booting from the drive, but I just couldn't do it.
I really wanted to do this without resorting to using Windows to do this task, but after a day's work, I was stuck. I finally just downloaded some typical tools like PEtoUSB or whatever and made the stupid thing. Now it works great, but I'm unhappy that I didn't learn anything from this.
Is it possible to make a flash drive from scratch (only a WinXP disk and linux) for installing Windows XP? Let me know if you have a checklist or some links I could read to learn this.