Getting XP bootable from USB?

NYSpeed Automotive NYSpeed Off Topic
1

I have been getting frustrated for the last day trying to get a USB 1GB memory stick booting into XP on my laptop.

I have determined that I can boot from the USB perfectly fine, but whenever I try to install BartPE, or even an edited winXP onto the stick, I get “operating system not found”

Does anyone have experience with getting a copy of XP booting on a USB drive?

The only function of this operating system is to be able to have access to my wireless connection to my house, and to be able to install one program.

Anyone have ideas?

I need to install a program called Slickr, which is a screen saver that accesses my Flickr picture account online. It says “for windows” so I imagine linux is out of the question, and I wouldn’t even know where to start if Linux was an option.

Help?

:slight_smile:

2

I was in the same boat,then I took the hard drive out and just copied the XP disc to it and just installed it off the HDD.Much easier and it went pretty fast.

3

I actually dont want an actual hard drive. I want ONLY the USB drive, with bootable XP on it :slight_smile:

In the last hour, I found two websites which I think are going to help!

I tried to install XP from the CD directly to the USB drive and it said “you need 1.5GB of free space”
Then, I tried it to a 2GB and it didnt work, due to some files not recognizing the USB correctly during the install.

1st site - Fixing the 6 files in the windows installation to allow USB.
http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

2nd site - Shrinking XP from 1.5GB to less than 800GB. It was intended for the EEE PC, but using the 1st site instructions before doing the 2nd website, I think I will be able to get this working.
http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/12/this-tutorial-will-show-you-how-to-slim.html

:crosses fingers and gets to work:

4

I have an awesome XP install for USB. It was 60mb file, and worked flawlessly. I gotta see if I still have it on my external since I know I don’t on my Mac.

5

I tried that one. I kept getting Operating System Not Found.

It asked for source and then destination. It finished OK, but when it went to boot from both of my computers (I tested it on both just in case one computer had an issue with booting it) I got the message both times.

Perhaps I did something wrong, but it seemed pretty easy to follow the instructions.

6

Well, heres a new problem.

I want to install XP onto a 1GB USB stick, and even my 273MB slip streamed USB copy tells me “Select a partition or unpartitioned space of at least 1273 megabytes”

So, anyone know how to turn this off? :slight_smile: I dont want to buy a new USB stick for this project… and the laptop fries any hard drives I plug into it.

7

I never had a problem installing windows onto a flash drive. It worked right away when i did it like a year ago.