[Jestem]

I have a laptop with no CD rom nor Floppy Drive, but supports USB Pendrive boot (as well as PXE booting).

I am simply trying to format the laptop's harddrive and make it bootable with just windows 98. Eventually I will install XP on it, using BartPE I will copy the installation files over network to a second partition on the hard drive, but meanwhile, all I want is to be able to boot from the harddrive, with Win98 dos prompt.

I have successfully formatted the hard drive and made 2 partitions, both fat32. When booting from the win98 bootable pendrive I can see, and can access both partitions (D: and E:, since the pendrive is recognized as "C:\". From the usb pendrive I tried to make the D: drive bootable by typing "sys c: d:", but whenever I restart the computer, without the USB bootable pendrive, I get an "Operating system not found" error.

Is there something else I need to do to make this hard drive bootable, other than making it a system disk, formatting fat32? Something to do with MBR?

The tools I've used so far are: Partition Magic 8 (recovery disk), BartPE (from USB pendrive).

Any help is appreciated!

Edit:
I did have a problem while running "sys c: d:" -- I got an error saying "Could not copy COMMAND.COM onto target disk", but I followed this MS Help&Support article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/96061, so I don't think that's the problem. Or is it?

[PangingJr]

Install Windows XP without floppy or cd drives - http://www.syschat.com/install-windo...py-cd-463.html

[Jestem]

Originally Posted by PangingJr

Install Windows XP without floppy or cd drives - http://www.syschat.com/install-windo...py-cd-463.html

Thanks for prompt response!

I was actually able to boot with USB pendrive, access the partition where my WIN XP installation files are, run winnt.exe, and let windows installation do the actual work by creating bootable partition on the hard drive.