Installing Windows XP on a New Computer Without a Floppy Drive

December 14, 2007 at 10:32 PM | categories: Computers | View Comments

New computers with an Intel Chipset like this one support RAID and AHCI. Unfortunately you can't install Windows XP without the use of the F6 + driver disk method of loading drivers for installation, but only using a floppy. What happens when you don't have a floppy drive? You have to jump through hoops.

In my search for how to handle the situation, I quickly found this post which sent me on the right track, in search of nLite which allows you to add drivers directly to the Windows install CD.

Unfortunately, if you don't happen to have another computer with a floppy drive both Intel and Asus make things even more difficult. The Asus install CD has a make disk utility to create the driver disk, but requires a floppy drive in order to get at the drivers. Intel does not make things much better. They also provide a disk creation utility. It happens that they use WinImage, which at least means you can extract the drivers, but it is unfortunate that they don't just provide a zip disk.

Once I figured out that I HAD to use the drivers from the disk image, things went smoothly.

For those of you shocked that I actually installed Windows XP, the computer is in fact for me and XP is necessary for the work I will be doing with Kate starting in January when my paternity leave ends.

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