Installing xp with hdd on laptop. The most complete step-by-step guide to installing Windows XP

Greetings. I decided to write about it today how to install Windows XP. They just brought me a computer, it’s kind of old, it’s already old. 256 MB RAM, Celeron processor, 40 GB hard drive. Well then? But whatever, XP is just right for him.

It’s just that everyone is already writing about installing Windows 8, but something has gone wrong with me. Well, oh well, I think that XP will still live, because whatever one may say, it’s a good OS and many people still work with it. I would like to immediately apologize for the photos; I took the photos on a 15-inch monitor and also on my phone. Ideally, of course, you could install Windows XP on a virtual machine and take beautiful screenshots, but I have a living example :).

Preparing to install Windows XP

Important! Make sure that drive C (the drive on which you have or have installed the operating system) does not contain information that is important to you. Desktop and folder “My documents” is stored on drive C. If there is information, it can be copied to drive D using a boot disk.

If everything is fine, then we move on. Insert the Windows XP installation disc into your computer's drive and restart your computer. If after the download starts you see loading at the bottom of the screen (the dots will move), then everything is fine. Quickly press any key (we didn’t have time:), restart the computer again) and you can proceed to the beginning of the installation.

Well, if you didn’t boot from the CD, but the computer started booting as usual from the hard drive, or an error appeared that caused you to reinstall the operating system, then it means that you don’t have the boot from the drive set first in your BIOS. I already wrote an article about that, but in this computer the BIOS was different from what is described in the article.

Go to the “Boot” tab.

Click “Boot Device Priority”.

Using the “Enter” and “Top” “Down” keys, set CD/DVD first, then the hard drive, etc. Now press F10 and save the changes. The computer will restart and the CD will begin loading. Press any button and proceed to the beginning of the installation.

Windows XP installation process

As soon as you press any key, we see this:

Here you will have to wait, well, nothing can be done, we wait :).

In this window, press “Enter”.

We accept the license agreement by pressing the F8 key.

As you can see, I have already found an old version of Windows XP and you can try to restore it, but I think you also need a clean installation, so press “Esc”.

We select the partition on the hard drive in which we want to install the operating system. As a rule, this is C:, select it and press “Enter”.

Confirm the installation with the “C” key.

Here you need to choose how the partition will be formatted. I advise you to choose FAT and not fast. Press “Enter”. Confirm formatting by pressing the “F” key.

We wait until the partition on the hard drive is formatted.

Copying files from the disk will start immediately, wait again :(.

You can immediately set up the language and keyboard. Click “Next”.

Enter your name and organization name. Let's move on.

Setting the time and date. Click “Next”.

We're waiting again, just don't go too far :).

I left “Regular settings” and clicked “Next”.

You can register with Microsoft. But I refused. Let's continue.

We specify users by computer.

Congratulations! Windows XP installation is complete.

All friends, the installation is complete and you can start using your computer. I also want to note that I installed the simplest build of Windows XP. You may also have an assembly, for example from ZWER, where the installation process may be slightly different. For example, in this version I still entered the key, I forgot to take a photo. But in the assembly from ZWER there seems to be no such item. Well, if it asks for a key, then look for it in the text file that you most likely downloaded with the disk image.

Well, that's it. Good luck friends!

How to install Windows from a hard drive? Install XP/Vista/7/8/10

Hello everyone, in the next Computer76 blog article I will show you how to install Windows from a hard drive. Yes, the usual Windows installation process for a user requires the presence of an optical drive, installation disk and/or flash drive with the operating system. What if there is none of this?

To all dissatisfied “professionals”. This article is not written for a guru. That’s why I try to describe everything in detail with the appropriate links. And I will immediately divide the article into several parts.

To install Windows from a hard drive, all we need is the Internet and a more or less functional operating system.

Why and when is this needed?

• Firstly, I have already mentioned the main reasons. The Windows disk may be in any of a number of dusty drawers, or just out of reach. The disk drives of some desktop users no longer work or work poorly. And this is generally a problem for laptop owners...
• Next. No need to gut the BIOS settings. What are all these keys F2, F10, DEL, settings? Advanced Settings, changing boot devices... Do you need it? No, of course not. You can install Windows from your hard drive right now.
• You will be protected from the need to urgently transfer the necessary files to various media before the upcoming formatting: this can be done later, slowly, in comfortable conditions.

But, naturally, before installing Windows from a hard drive, we still have to get the installation files themselves somewhere. That is, download Windows from the network. To do this, you can refer to the section or specifically to the article If much remains unclear, refer to the article

However, you can right now download the image directly from a Microsoft server of ANY VERSION using a simple file:

There are no viruses at any stage of working with the file. I checked it personally and I also packed it. When choosing a Windows version, the antivirus should respond to the user's choice - this is normal. Sequentially select:

• version
• capacity of the future system

All that remains is to indicate the location where you will upload the Windows image. I use this utility in more detail in the article .

What do you need to install Windows from your hard drive?

I’ll give you a set of programs that will be useful to us.

• Actually, downloaded from the Windows network
• Program Daemon Tools for working with images (how to work with it is described in the article). The 7-zip archiver can also unpack the image, but stock up on an image “reader”
• Program EasyBCD to work with the boot record so that the computer correctly displays input into the new system.
• You can immediately stock up for your device. First download them from the network and put them in a folder, for example, Drivers. In any case, you can't go anywhere without drivers. However, this is not necessary; the operation can be done later (if the Windows installation files see the network card). I'll risk skipping this step for now.

ATTENTION

The described method is not suitable for computers with Windows operating systems of the NT family (up to and including Windows XP). EasyBCD they will not work as we need. In any version, you don’t have to look!

Everything seems...

I won’t get excited about where to find a Windows image for a long time. You have already read my articles and we take it as an axiom that the Windows image is already on the computer. Don't push it too far. Personally, I throw all temporary files directly onto the Desktop.
Now you need to prepare your hard drive to accept the new system in order to install Windows from the hard drive. We will consider the option when the system will be installed second to the existing one. However, the method is quite applicable if the new copy of Windows overwrites the previous one. Now I do not advise you to do this. But one condition is unshakable - the presence of a free partition on the hard drive from which the installation files of the new Windows will be copied. , described in detail in the blog article of the same name. I did this on the same laptop.

So, the hard drive is broken, the Windows image is on the computer. And now, actually, how to install Windows from a hard drive.

Install programs Daemon Tools And EasyBCD on the computer so as not to be distracted later. You know how to install programs, I think.

Now let's look at the process of installing Windows from a hard drive using a specific example.

A laptop arrived with Windows Vista pre-installed and ready to go. The operation of the system turned out to be unstable, the system itself was badly beaten, and it was decided to install a second Windows 7 system. As you can see in the photo below, I had already divided the hard drive into three logical partitions. One of them is now occupied by Vist (naturally WITH), the second one was reserved by the hostess for files stored on the computer (disk D), and the third (F) reserved by me for Windows 7 - I pinched off a small piece from the storage.

START – Computer – Service(in the toolbar) – Folder options...– tab View– set Show hidden files, folders, drives

Let's launch Daemon Tools. Let's show her the path to the Windows 7 image.

Then copy all the Windows installation files from the virtual drive and transfer them to the free partition that is reserved for the future Windows 7, that is, to drive F in my case. I put everything on drive F. It took me about 7 minutes to copy.

Let's try installing Windows from a hard drive

Let's launch EasyBCD with administrator rights. We are greeted by the settings window. Everything here is in English, but I'll walk you through it. Make sure you are in the menu Add New Entry:

Lower right in Removable/External media select tab WinPE. In the field Name (Name) enter the name of the system. I designated it as "Seven". In the field Path (Path) by clicking on the binoculars with the folder to the right of the field to fill, indicate the path to the file boot.wim, which is located in the newly created folder sources on disk F.

That is, the path on my laptop looked like:

F – sources – boot.wim

In general, this is what I ended up with:

Let's finish the settings. We need a button on the right Add Entry (Add).

ATTENTION

Clicking the button View Settings (Current menu) you can see what the bootloader menu will be like. This will be the first window that will allow you to select your operating system. Look at it before you make changes. It can be edited later. But now it should look something like this:

You will see labels numbered Entry#1 and Entry#2 (Entry 1 and Entry 2) in the same order. Will load first Seven, second - Vista. That is, after completing the settings and the inevitable reboot, you will see this window:

But that comes later.

If you managed to click something, click on the button on the left Edit Boot Menu (Edit Download Menu)

And delete incorrect entries. You can swap the loading order of the buttons Up And Down(Up And Down), delete selected unnecessary records with the button Delete, change the loading wait time from 30 sec. to 0. In general, play to your taste and admire the result after a reboot. If you made changes in this menu, save using the button below Save Settings (Save).

Are you all ready? Let's go. Don't close anything and just reboot.

The installation took me less than 10 minutes. As you will see for yourself, installing Windows from a hard drive is very fast.

After the installation of Windows 7 is completed, the boot menu will look like this:

Windows 7 is installed.. but the word Seven is in the way

Let's remove it using the same EasyBCD. Return to Vista, launch the program and enter the menu Edit Boot Menu:

P.S.

At some point, one of the systems may become boring... In my example, Vista is almost completely dead. It will be easy to remove. Just log into the new system (mine is Windows 7) and:

• Format the entire logical drive with Vista under Windows 7. All data will be destroyed! It may not be possible to do this using Windows tools; you will have to use the program . You can find out how to work with it in the article.
• however, in some cases, especially for devices with a pre-installed OS, you cannot do without a special disk to remove an unnecessary system. We will look at working with such disks in another article.
• using a program already installed on Windows 7 EasyBCD remove the Vista entry from the bootloader. How to do this is clear from the written article.

P.P.S. EasyBCD will not only allow you to boot operating systems directly from your hard drive. With its help you can:

any disk directly in the boot menu

In my previous article, I already told you how to install the Windows XP operating system on your computer. There the situation was considered when Windows is installed on top of an existing system. In my example, the hard drive was already partitioned at some point.
But what if you need to install Windows on a brand new hard drive? The need for this may arise if, for example, you bought a new computer without a pre-installed system. In this case, there are certainly differences in the installation process.

So let's get started installing Windows XP on a new hard drive.

Having turned on the computer, the first thing we do is go to BIOS and set up booting from disk (how to do this is described in detail). After saving all the necessary settings in the BIOS, insert a boot disk with the Windows XP operating system into the drive and reboot the computer.

After the reboot, the Windows installer shell will appear on the screen. The hardware installed on the computer will be checked fairly quickly and the files for installation will begin to download.
At the end of this process, a window will appear asking you to begin installing Windows. Click Enter on the keyboard.
Next, accept the license agreement by clicking F8.
Because we install Windows XP on a completely new, unformatted hard drive, then this window will appear in front of us:
The size of the unallocated area is the volume of our hard drive. In my case it is almost 500 GB.

To continue the installation, you need to create a partition on the disk on which we will later install the operating system. To do this, press the key WITH on the keyboard.
Next you need to specify the size of the partition to be created. Let's make it 100 GB. Because the size is indicated in megabytes, so write 100000 and click Enter.
In the window that appears, the created section will be highlighted in a separate line indicating the letter assigned to it (usually WITH), file system (while it is still “ new (unformatted)" and its size. Below it is a line with the remaining unallocated area, which can be divided into the required number of sections in exactly the same way. We will do this later - directly on the installed system.
To install Windows XP on the selected partition, click Enter.

Next you will be asked to select a file system. Recommended to use NTFS. Click to continue Enter.
After this, the hard drive will begin formatting, and all information on it will be destroyed. But because We are installing the operating system on a blank disk - there is no information there yet :)

Having purchased an SSD drive, each user will find it necessary to save the installed operating system and configuration files using backup and data transfer tools. After all, carefully setting up a new OS is certainly not comparable to the labor costs of creating a disk image and its further transfer. How to install Windows XP from a hard drive, or more precisely, how to transfer it to an SSD drive will be discussed today.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that here we consider the steps to create a clone of Windows XP already installed on a hard drive and migrate it to an SSD drive, since this is the easiest way and the installation will end in success.

Attention: do not rush to delete data from your HDD until you are sure that the system on the SSD drive is stable! It is necessary to backup important information!

Required Software

• A free utility such as CCleaner to clean the system (including the registry) of unnecessary data.
• A unique program, Migrate OS to SSD, from Paragon for transferring software environments and data to an SSD drive.
• AS SSD Benchmark utility for checking the correct alignment of SSD disk partitions.

Preparing the OS for migration

The process will be greatly simplified if a special partition was created for the system disk when installing Windows XP. Users, in most cases, do just that: they create a system partition C:, allocating no more than 20-30 Gb to it, which in the future, when reinstalling the system over the old one, prevents the loss of data located in other volumes. In the event that the disk is one partition and the system files are located on it together with user data, system migration will become somewhat more complicated when you want to delete system files from this disk in order to completely free it up for storing information. In this case, a backup followed by full formatting will help.

Initially, we will need to create a backup of all important files. Please note, not for the reason that the operation of migrating a partition is dangerous due to data loss, but for reasons of “insurance just in case.” You can make an archive copy of only user data, or you can backup the entire system partition. It is recommended to save backup copies on any external storage media, in cloud storage, or transfer them to another computer using any program. All this is done in order to be able, after successfully migrating the system to an SSD disk, to format the old piece of hardware, deleting all system files from it and distributing free space for the most convenient use. Then you will only have to move your personal data in place to return a structure similar to the original one: for example, the former partition (C:) used by the system will be physically located on an SSD drive, and the hard drive will be used entirely to place working data on it ( possibly labeled D:). As a result, everything will be in its place.

Let's look at a case in which Windows XP was installed on a computer without creating a separate partition and user data was located on the same volume. Then instead of one disk you will have two and, obviously, you will have to manually edit the paths for some programs, or it is better to re-install them on top of previously installed versions.

The next stage of preparation for the transfer is not necessary, but it is advisable to do it, since cleaning Windows XP and the system disk of unnecessary information will reduce the process time. Some things can be removed manually:

• delete files from the recycle bin;
• delete your own temporary files;
• uninstall unnecessary programs and their components.

Using a special utility such as CCleaner, we perform final cleaning:

• clear Windows XP of temporary files;
• clear the registry of unused keys;
• remove unnecessary programs from startup.

I also recommend performing an anti-virus inspection for the presence of Trojan horses and spyware to be sure that there are no vulnerabilities on your computer. Of course, after a thorough cleaning, you need to test the performance of the operating system and programs, and if something goes wrong, roll back to the previous state, restoring the data on top of the non-working ones (for this you need to make a backup copy).

Creating a system image

There are many different ways to do this, but the vast majority of them require special knowledge, skills and consideration of certain nuances. In general, you can transfer system files and the boot area using any program that is created for such tasks (such as True Image from Acrinis), but this, again, requires the user to have certain knowledge and does not in all cases give the necessary result , especially on the first try.

The problem of transferring the Windows XP operating system to an SSD drive is easily solved if you use the Migrate OS to SSD utility specially developed for this purpose from the well-known company Paragon. It is not free, but if you take into account the fact that you were allowed to spend at least 3,500 rubles on purchasing a solid-state drive, then another 390 rubles is already pennies. It is also possible to find a broken version on the Internet, but this is on your conscience. If it turns out that this program of a different version is already installed on your computer, it is advisable to install the new one not on top of it, but by completely uninstalling the previous one.

As the name makes clear, it will do exactly what is required, and will solve a number of problems without asking unnecessary questions. You won’t even notice how when using it, SSD disk partitions are automatically aligned along the boundaries of four-kilobyte blocks for optimal operation and extending its service life. When using other applications, you must do this operation yourself.

Before you start migrating, the program itself prompts you to select only folders that contain the information necessary for the operation of Windows XP and installed applications. Users' personal data (music files, videos, photos, unused programs and text documents) will remain on the donor disk. This allows you to create a compact system, which will later be transferred to an SSD. In addition, the program itself performs sector alignment and SSD layout in such a way as to use all free memory. The uniqueness of the sector-by-sector copying technology from Paragon Software guarantees subsequent loading of the transferred Windows XP on a new disk, and it is also possible to install it on top of a system previously existing on it

So let's begin. Open the Disk Management window. We have a 250 Gb hard drive installed, divided into a couple of partitions. One (drive C:) contains the Windows XP operating system, which we will transfer to our SSD solid-state drive with 120 GB on board. Now it is an unmarked area.

Open the Migrate OS to SSD utility. Click Next.

The program automatically finds the SSD drive and is ready to migrate the operating system. Here you need to pay attention to the point “Use all available space for the partition with OS”. Be sure to check the box here. In this case, all unoccupied space on the solid-state drive will be allocated for creating one new partition (C:) with the transferred Windows XP. This is explained by the fact that solid-state drives are used, for the most part, only for installing the operating system.

If you click on “Select what folders should be copied”, you will be able to supplement your selection with the folders needed for copying. If you need the entire Windows XP, leave everything as default.

Click the Copy button.

If we compare the process of creating an image with Acronis, then in the case of the latter, it takes much longer.

So, the Migrate OS to SSD program has already completed the migration of Windows XP to an SSD drive. The final step will be a window in which you will be asked to boot directly from the solid-state drive. We agree and reboot.

All that remains is to go into the BIOS (F8 or Del) when booting and set the boot order from the SSD drive. This is done in the Boot tab.

If your actions were carried out in strict accordance with those discussed above, then you have already booted from the SSD disk into the migrated system. Let's check. Disk Management shows that the system was successfully migrated.

That's probably all!

After the successful start of the migrated system, do not forget to tidy up the old drive: format it and transfer your personal data.