Modern computers often lack floppy drives, and some even lack CD drives. However, as long as there is a USB port, you can create a USB boot disk, boot from it, and install an operating system. As many online USB boot disk creation guides suggest, you should select the USB-ZIP mode when creating a USB boot disk. This way, after booting, the USB will emulate a floppy disk and use the A drive letter. The problem arises when some motherboards support USB booting but lack the USB-ZIP mode. Even if the USB boot disk is in ZIP mode, it can only boot in USB-HDD mode, where the USB disk occupies the C drive letter. In this case, installing a Windows operating system is not possible because during partition processing, Windows assigns the D drive letter to the first partition of the hard disk, causing everything to become disorganized.
When I encountered such a computer, after repeated attempts, I discovered that I could use GRUB to boot a virtual DOS boot floppy disk image. This may not be the simplest method, but I hope it provides some new ideas for those facing similar challenges.
This computer originally had Windows XP installed, with two NTFS partitions: C and D. First, place the Windows 2003 installation files in the D partition to prepare for a hard disk installation.
Create a USB boot disk that supports NTFS. There are many tutorials online, so I won’t elaborate here.
Store the files for loading the memory-based floppy disk image on the newly created USB boot disk. Here are five files I tested and found usable. You can download them from http://download.csdn.net/source/526391. Create a folder on the USB boot disk, such as BOOTDOS, and extract these files into the BOOTDOS folder for later use.
Restart the computer, set the BIOS to boot from USB, and enter the USB’s DOS environment. Since USB-ZIP mode is not supported here, the USB disk is assigned the C drive letter in DOS, and the drive letters of the existing hard disk partitions are shifted. The first partition of the hard disk, which originally had Windows XP installed, is now the D drive.
Use the
fdiskcommand to delete and recreate the first partition of the hard disk, formatting it as FAT32.Copy the five files from the BOOTDOS folder on the USB boot disk, along with the files needed to load NTFS partitions (NTDLL.DLL, ntfs.sys, ntfschk.exe, ntfspro.exe, ntoskrnl.exe) and the SMARTDRV.EXE file for accelerating file reading during Windows installation (these files are in the root directory of the USB boot disk), to the newly formatted FAT32 first partition of the hard disk.
Remove the USB boot disk, restart the computer, and select GRUB from the boot menu. On the next screen, select the only option, "Dos from Windows 98," and then choose "Boot from CD-ROM." You will see a boot menu similar to the one from floppy boot disks. Select "Without CD-ROM support"—since the machine has no CD drive, skipping CD-ROM support might speed things up. If everything goes smoothly, you will enter pure DOS from Windows 98. Most importantly, the DOS environment now assigns the A drive letter, and the first partition of the hard disk formatted as FAT32 is assigned the C drive letter.
Switch to the C drive and run
ntfspro.exe. This will list the NTFS second partition of the hard disk as successfully loaded as the D drive. RunSMARTDRV.EXE, and then you can navigate to the D drive to locate the Windows installation files and proceed with the installation.
Original Link: https://snowpeak.blog.csdn.net/article/details/2612396