Help - need to install xp over network from recovery discs

[zambinni]

I have a sony vaio laptop, and I bought a new 60G HD. Unfortunately, the cd player seems to have crapped out on me. Can anyone tell me how to either A) install from one of my other machines (vaio tower w/xp pro, firewire + ethernet cd, dvd; HP vectra w/linux, ethernet, cd; I also have usb cd, and usb/firewire external HD) or B) get the image from my 20G internal to the new 60G internal??

I can set the bios to network install, or i Link install.

trying to boot thusly gets "client mac address: [my mac addr], and guid: [some guid]" and "PXE E53 No boot filename recieved"

any help, so I don't have to pay some guy 80 bucks to image copy my drive, effectively doubling the price, would be greatly appreciated.

 

[gbhall]

disk image is best

I take it you have got the old drive out of your laptop, and have already installed the new?

You can mount your old drive in one of your other machines, and image it to your new HDD (subsequently mounted in the other machine), by creating a disk image and re-loading it to your new HDD. For this, you will need a special HDD cable designed for the small HDD connector, with an IDE connector on the other end. Can't help you to source that however, but they ARE available, and in my opinion this is definitely the easiest way to do it - you just end up with your old machine exactly as it was, with a bigger HDD.

Any other approach requires a network to connect to your laptop, with the new HDD already in it. Networking to a laptop without an OS is a bit of a poser. At the least, you will need a floppy drive in the laptop. let us know if you have one.

BTW if you do not already possess software for HD imaging, look at
www.thefreecountry.com/utilities/backupandimage.shtml

 

[zambinni]

Yes, the laptop has a working floppy drive. The first thing I tried was D/L-ing the boot disks from MS, but that got me to a spot where it wanted me to load a "home edition" cd into the cdrom...

 

[RealBlackStuff]

Using a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, image your old HD in the other PC, then put the image onto the new HD, also in the other PC.
Then put the new HD back in the laptop.
http://www.nextag.com/laptop-ide-hard-drive-adapter/search-html

 

[zambinni]

Thanks, I got the adapter yesterday in downtown San Francisco, for 6 bucks. I'm having a little trouble with the imaging software because most of it uses the CD. The one that can be used with a diskette, and doesn't require a dhcp and ftp server (savepart), doesn't quite fit on the dos boot disc. it's about 1kb too heavy. I'll try making a new boot disk from a win 98 machine and see if that makes a difference... x my fingers.

 

[urbandragon]

just a quick queston?
were you trying to install XP home or XP pro?

if you were trying to install xp pro and using the 6 setup disks used for windows xp home edition it will not work, you must download the setup disks for your version of xp.

why is the cd-rom "crapped" out.. did it work before this mess started, if so you may need to simply change your boot sequence to CD-ROM as the first boot device.

 

[zambinni]

I am trying to install home edition. I don't actually have an OS disk. What I have are recovery CDs, I guess since microsoft customers can't actually be trusted to have a copy of the software that they paid for... I think the CD's are specific to the Sony model, which like a lot of computers, are rev.ed every couple of days..

The CD player has acted flakey since I bought the computer about 3 1/2 years ago. First, it wouldn't read music CDs. Then it wouldn't read any kind of 'burned' CDs. Half of the movies I play in it freeze up in the middle of the film, irrecoverably. (could be the viewer softare though). It started getting flakey, when I got the current smaller HDD, with the recovey CDs. now it just won't read them. I usually have to load programs with the external USB CD.

I was being a cripple when I wrote the last post. I'm looking through some of the other imaging programs.

The CDROM is enabled, at the top of the bios boot list.

 

[zambinni]

Can anyone tell me what's the story with a cable that has a 40 pin layout, with one of the holes, in the middle of the female, filled in?? My 40 pin adapter won't go into it...

 

[gbhall]

what are you doing?

Thanks, I got the adapter yesterday in downtown San Francisco, for 6 bucks. I'm having a little trouble with the imaging software because most of it uses the CD. The one that can be used with a diskette, and doesn't require a dhcp and ftp server (savepart), doesn't quite fit on the dos boot disc. it's about 1kb too heavy. I'll try making a new boot disk from a win 98 machine and see if that makes a difference... x my fingers.

wait a minute, you're supposedly imaging your old HDD onto a new one - you should do that ALL on another PC...what's this about floppy diks drives,...XP re-install....none necessary is it?. if you just use another PC you install the old HDD in it using the adaptor you have just aquired (set or check the biois to be sure it is accepted, and just unplug a CD/DVD if you have run out of EIDE connections). Then make images onto your other PC MAIN HDD of both or all partitions of your old laptop HDD.

Next install your New laptop HDD in your other PC instead of the original laptop HDD, and use the imaging software to re-create the original laptop HDD partitions on the New laptop HDD.

Finally put the new laptop HDD into the actual laptop, and it should boot up fine. And you will have the original WinXP restore partition ready available to use if you really want to start all over....

 

[zambinni]

Thank you. I did just that. It just took me a couple days to get up the courage to A) plug the laptop HDD into the IDE cable in the tower (paranoid about loss of data); B) to take some snippers to the adapter, since it had 40 pins and would not plug into the cable which had the #20 hole plugged up.

The diskette was necessary for the imaging software to boot off of.

All is well now, I'm typing on the laptop with the new bigger drive. It took me a couple of trys with the imaging software, but I got it after properly imaging the mbr, partition table, first sector, and system drive.

the only persistent problem is that I couldn't resize the system partition, which I wanted to make a little bigger. I looked at software that does this, but you can't use it on the system partition. fearing that resizing the partition, while the drive was on the tower, might render the partition table all messed up, I opted to live with it.

Thanks again for everyone's helpful suggestions. This is a great forum!

 

[RealBlackStuff]

gbhall
I told zambinni the very same thing in less than 2 sentences....

zambinni
With Partition Magic you can resize any partition.

 

[zambinni]

Thanks again mate! Turns out I have that software on a super Winpe disk I got, when I procured the Linux box.. Pints are on me.

Z