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Xp Pro 32Multi Partition Install
Use any of these procedures at your own risk!!
Okay here's some suggestions on how to perform the most common procedures with Xp Pro also known as Xp Professional. First off we're not going over how to do the simple install of xp we'll assume you're way beyond that and what you want is the trick stuff.
One way to install Xp is to create 3 partitions in the first one we'll put Xp the second one we'll put data and the third one we'll put a backup of the system using ghost or another program like it. With the cheap large hard drives today there is no reason not to partition the hard drive into some large partitions. Usually I do that with the OS after installing on a single created partition. Let's say we have a terabyte drive I would create a 350 gig boot partition, a 350 gig data partition and use the rest as a backup partition. Also when doing this I would make the last partition a logical drive not a primary drive the reason is that a logical drive can be accessed a little easier should any of the primaries crash and burn in which case you might still be able to ghost your backup image to a new drive should you have a worst case situation. This means when doing the initial install we only create one partition roughly a third or forty percent of the drive size. We'll do the rest of the partitioning with the OS after we've got it installed.
This assumes you are using Symantec Ghost which is a very good program for doing this with, you could however do it with Acronis True Image and many other programs this assumes Ghost because it is probably the best known and most widly used program of this type. You can use Ghost from a floppy or a CD or even install it and run it from there. It is also known to be on several utility disks such as Barts and Hirens Boot Cd until version 10.6 and you are instructed to have a license before using it with those CD's. And it's pretty inexpensive I paid $15 after rebate for my latest copy, ebay has it for $20 for version 15 which work with Window 7 too.
C:We name SystemBoot
D:We name Data
Z:We name SystemBack we make this a logical drive.
That's right we move the backup to z: so it's out of the way of common access and mistakes. What you need to do is create the folders on the Z: drive before you attempt to do the partition to image its much quicker and makes more sense when you are trying to do your backup or restore. On Microsoft's site I choose custom on the updates so I can choose what order I want things and if I want the drivers they recommend for my devices or not. I generally make the first image after a full install with all the updates and without programs on it. I call this folder "Base Install". Generally I will name the file by the date of the image such as: 1_11_11 so I know when I made it.
Here is a tutorial on how to do the partition to image.
What I generally do assuming there enough room to make several images of my boot drive on the SystemBack drive is make the first one after the base install with all the updates and a second image of the boot partition after I've installed all my standard programs except the antivirus. I have stuff I like on my system as I'm sure you do so I put those on next like CorelDraw, Office, Adobe Master Suite, PowerDVD, Firefox and EZ Media Creator. The programs you use all the time and you will always have on your machine and I get all the updates to them. I create another folder on my Z: drive called "Full Install" then I make an image to that. Finally I put everything else on that I want apps that I use occasionally and might remove or change miscellaneous stuff and even my antivirus. Naturally while you're doing the first two steps you shouldn't be surfing the net for trash go only to the sites of the programs you have installed in your base install and of course Microsoft's site. Now after I've got everything I want on the machine including the antivirus and I've scanned my system and know it's clean this is where I make my finale image which I call "OS with All Apps" I created folders with those names and put the images in them now I can go on with my life.
Now use your D: drive for your data if I'm editing video or whatever I put it on D: with a folder name that makes sense for what it is. If you're smart you'll even put your My Documents and music and everything you can on this partition, here is instructions on how to do that if you want. Now assuming that you've done all that correctly. Should you crash your C: drive or SystemBoot you can always go back to whatever setup you want without a big hassle. Supposed new upgrades of all your favorite programs come out you can choose to go back to your "Base Install" go back to Microsoft get the now current updates and install your apps from ground zero. Even if you decide to eliminate one of your favorites and go to a new program from a different vendor being able to go back to the "Base Install" is nice and saves tons of time. Often you'll have added a bunch of trash over time, we all do and your system isn't working like it should or you've gotten a virus or your antivirus isn't working right or you have switched to a new one. Then you can go back to your "Full Install" which has all your stuff except the antivirus. So you get the updates added to your system and your main programs and install a new antivirus and off you go. It's easy to see the points you might restore to if you had the choices and you can always update your "OS with All Apps" at any time or create new ones as time goes on assuming you have the space. I do that on all the systems I build for myself and for customers I usually do just the full install. You can try and explain the rest but they won't do it and they don't get it so I just have one image and yet they are really happy when I can restore their system to that point. If you use the defaults that windows gives you, you'll have all your documents and stuff like pictures in your documents and settings folder under your name my documents so move it to the D: drive before you start. Naturally everything will be overwritten on the restore so pull off whatever you want to keep. Like email you can move your PST files and contacts to another drive and import them all back in I assume you know about where and what files you want to keep and where they are. If you don’t know where the files you want are look that up and save them before you do the restore. This site has step by step restore ghost image to partition instructions and many other instructions on Xp. I assume no responsibility for your lack of knowledge or misunderstanding of the procedures involved in these descriptions.
DOWNGRADING DESKTOPS TO XP
Okay lets talk about taking one of the newer machines and making it work with Xp pro. This is a battle that can be fought a bunch of differnent ways. Assuming that you are using one of the newer machines with SATA drives the first place to start is with Xp Pro Service pack 3 because it's the first one to have SATA drivers included in the install. No, it doesn't have all of them and this can be an issue when attempting to install it especially with other chipsets like NVidia. You will see plenty of people tell you that the way to do this is go into the bios and select compatability mode and that will work with some of them but obviously the best way to make it work is with the drivers that are right for your chipset.
When you start to install Xp from it's CD you have a choice to add additional drivers hit F6 during the install then it wants to find the drivers on the floppy and that's the only place it will take them from. The problem with that is many of the newer machines don't have a floppy assuming you've found the drivers for the chipset and that's a big assumption. Now you have a couple of choices on how to get this to work, first you can use a USB floppy, assuming you have one and it will load the drivers from there. If you think you have the right drivers you could slipstream a Xp Pro Cd with the drivers included in the slipstream. I'm not going to go into slipstreaming here it's all over the web and you can find it in lots of places here's one look for Nlite. I'm going to give you another easier and faster method for doing it that I've used and works.
You will still need a valid COA when you do this and I don't reccommend this for those without access to some resources of other machines and parts, but for a tech who is going to have to do this again and again this has worked. For desktops this is really pretty easy first we'll do an install on a machine that's close to what we need assuming it's a new Dell or Hp we'll take a older one of the same brand and hang the new drive and do the install if you have an image already of what you want on the machine you can ghost that. Let's say the old one has a Intel chipset and the new one our target has an Nvidia chipset this is a pretty common scenario so we do the install or ghost an image to the old one and we don't bother getting all the updates because they won't be right for our target machine anyway.
If you are using an OEM disk from the same manufacturer it usually won't need authentication so you won't have to deal with that during the install. Once the machine is up an booting now we'll stick a SATA controller into one of the pci slots assuming you have one of those on both your source (Old) and target (New) machines. Generally I use a promise controller, there is one that really works great that was made for Maxtor they had them in SATA 150 and 300 you can find them on ebay for about $20 here's a picture this isn't a current listing but it's what to look for or any good SATA Controller will work that will fit both units try and stay away from the raid ones as it is another issue to deal with. If you are trying to adapt very dissimilar machines as I had to do recently there is an adapter for Pci Express to PCI made by Startech you can find them at Newegg or Walmart the model is PEX1PCI1 they run about $40 if you need to go that way.
The trick is after you've got the old machine running add the Promise or whatever SATA controller into the source machine and get the drivers for that controller loaded into your system. Once those are running correctly shut the machine down and connect your hard drive directly to the PCI SATA controller and reboot you may have to tell the bios to boot from the controller it depends on your bios in most cases it will search and find the controller and boot from it, since it should be the only bootable device. Do I have to tell you to take the cd out? Yes, you could install it to that controller to begin with if you wanted but it's usually easier to just add the controller and load the drivers when it's running off the motherboard's controller plus you may not have a floppy and this eliminates all that battle anyway. Once it's booting from the PCI SATA controller now we do the simple move of putting the drive and the contoller into the new machine. Once again you may have to tell the bios where everything is but you usually won't. Now we'll get the drivers for this new motherboard and we can find them a lot easier now since we've got this running Xp Pro Service Pack 3. The first thing you'll need is the network card drivers and the way I usually do this is I have USB network adapter and the drivers on a jump drive for it. So I hook up the USB Network adapter Newegg has one for $20 I like the ones with the cable they'll fit anything walmart has a cheap one for $15 and load its drivers and start looking for all the rest of the drivers I'll need to make this motherboard happy. You can also speed up this process if you have some type of driver locating software like Driver Genius or Driver Magician but be careful because sometimes they may try and put drivers that won't work with the OS "XP Pro" you're trying to run. They see the devices and try to put the Windows 7 or Vista driver in for it. Most everything is findable you may have to look around but I usually find the drivers if I know what I'm looking for. You can load free programs like Belarc Advisior or System Information for Windows or HwInfo32 or you can purchase AIDA64 or Everest which will give you great information as to what Devices are really on your system. You can also find some of these system information tools in a portable version which you can have on your thumb drive and either load them to the machine or run them from there. Some of the driver finders are also availiable in portable versions or you can buy one and use something like vmware to make them portable.
I've explained these steps to other techs many times who had customers who bought new machines and wanted to run Xp Pro and not Vista or Windows 7 that came with their new machine. You might also find it works for people who want to move everything they have on their old Machine to a new machine or bonce their current system to a bigger hard drive in a newer system. Usually if they want to move everything from an Old Machine to a New Machine I reccommend bouncing it to a new drive first don't risk losing the old data during the transfer. You can always attempt it again if you fail the first time as long as you haven't killed the original. Anyway once you have the chipset drivers you should be able to run the hard drive off your motherboard and remove the PCI SATA controller and start finding all the rest of the device drivers. If you're not running an OEM Xp install you may have to put your new keys in at this point because it will sure see a change of devices usually if you do this all at one time you have some time to activate on a retail version and you can get everything in place long before that ends and just register once. If you get it so you can't get on the system there is a way to get around to get your network card working and do the online activation it's posted in troubleshooting. Logging on to an expired system. Yes you can try downloading whatever drivers you think will work on your target machine on the old one and put them in a folder so you don't have to use a USB network adapter or whatever. If you've got a copy of Xp Lite with AIDA64 or some kind of system info on it you could boot up the target system off that and begin to find what devices its going to need drivers for specifically chipsets and network drivers and video. So you could preload them to the hard drive before you move it or put them on a jump drive. If you've got a better plan use it and don't ask me to spell this out any more than I have already those that get it get it. This works. I'm not doing this to help neophytes transfer their OS's between systems this is for those who understand what this is all about if you don't get it from these instructions you probably shouldn't try it.
I'm not a lawyer so it's not my place to advise on any potential licensing issues. In my opinion if they have a legal COA for the OS they want to run on their system they should be able to legally do it. As I understand and you should validate this yourself Vista Business or Professional and Window 7 Professional and Enterprise can move down legally to run Xp Pro and you can get Microsoft to give you a install code for Xp Pro if you have those versions. I certainly don't advocate doing anything illegal. You can find Xp Pro with COA's for as little as $50-
NEW LAPTOPS DOWNGRADING THEM TO XP
Now this is a dfferent battle but the way to resolve it is still very similar. We can't switch SATA controllers around on them so we're left with how to get Xp Pro on one that don't come with it. Here again I generally use the same method of attack find something close although not necessarily a laptop. Lets say we've got a new HP laptop with Windows 7 on it and we want Xp Pro on it instead. You can boot the laptop with Xp Lite if it's got a cd/dvd and some type of system info on a jump drive and see what chipset is on it or add the System Info Program to the Xp Lite drive we're going to need it later. Alternately you could go to the manufacturers website and look up the drivers in the specs if you can find them and look for the Xp F6 install drivers. After we find out what chipset it has look for the F6 Floppy for that chipset. You'd be surprised at the fact that there is usually one out there or a place with the Xp drivers for it. Intel is a great source for them and Dell Support is also really good even if the machine you're trying to make work isn't a Dell. Go to their support site and in the search box upper right put the chipset you are looking for or look for a laptop with that chipset once you get the results look for the compatability description on the download and you'll see what OS's it will work for. Start with the older or lower version numbers when you're looking for XP Pro stuff. They have got a lot of laptops that have the Drivers for all kinds of chipsets. Dell has made a lot of different combinations I think theirs is one of the best sites on the web for drivers for most everything. When you download one of there drivers most are self extracting and want to go to the C:folder you can aim them anywhere by changing their path. Ususally I will let them go to the Dell folder and then I'll name the subfolder to something like NvidiaChipset1 and the next would be NvidiaChipset2 and so on. Finally once you've found the one or the ones you think will work download them to a machine other than the one you're doing the install to and extract it to their own folder. Some drivers are in exe files that want to install and you probably don't want them to install to the machine you're downloading them to. In that case extract them using a extracting tool like Winrar or Universal Extractor or Izarch or there are dos commands you can pass that will extract exe files I've listed them in troubleshooting. Once you have the drivers you can have several and in fact once you've done a lot of them it gets easier because you've already got a selection of various systems drivers. Usually I put the drivers on a jump drive or a usb hard drive we'll access them in the next process.
First off we pull the laptops drive out find and use a Desktop with a SATA controller and a CD Rom now we're going to do a base install but we're putting it on the laptops SATA hard drive. Naturally we disconnect the desktops original drive or drives so we don't get confused and accidentially put an OS on it. You also could use a Promise controller to do this it has a neutral translation bios that seems to work anywhere I have ghosted a base installation from a desktop drive to the laptop's drive and then start there. Once we're done don't go after all the drivers for the source machine because we don't need them unless they have the same chipset. What I like to use is Paragon Disk Recovery but there are several other packages out there that do the same thing supposedly Farstone Total Recovery will do it as well, they claim restoration on dissimaliar machines I haven't tried theirs. Next we put the drive back with Xp now on it back in the laptop and try to boot it, more than likely it's going to blue screen because the machines are going to be so different. Now we use the Paragon or some other migration tool and boot to it's cd from there you tell it you want to correct the drivers the selections are pretty simple. Do a selective StartUp or go into the bios and tell it to boot from the CD or choose you're selective boot options generally F12 for Dell or escape or F10 or F12 for HP's. Once you boot from Paragon's boot disk they have a free one I don't know if it has all the features of the full one that I use. The full version starts like you're going into Win 7 then gives you it's menu selections. Here's a link to the pdf instructions from their site pretty much follow these steps and when it gets to update drivers automatically aim it to your usb drive or folder on the hard drive or jump drive you've put the drivers in. On a side note if you put a lot of different drivers on your external usb hard drive like after you've saved the drivers from dozens of machines you can just aim it to the top level folder and it will go thru and find the drivers here is some screen captures I made using Paragaon Hard Disk Manager 2011. It will find and install all the drivers if they are there, that means video cards, network cards, sound cards everything it can find the correct driver for. I usually just aim it to the chipset driver and after it finds it and I tell it to install it, the next selection is reboot. At this point your system should boot correctly and you should be now just looking for the drivers you need to get everything else working on the laptop or if you had a large repository of drivers you may be done now and all you're looking for is Microsoft updates. Either way you're up and running a new machine with and old OS, Xp Pro and hopefully happily running it. As I said earlier if you're trying to move someone's existing system it's best to do it on a backup drive and have the original safe so you can do it again should you botch the move. After you've done a few of them it's up to you, but I still keep the original drive till I'm certain it's all done right and working right. It's always better to be safe than sorry.