SiC – David Sidwell

So here we are the following morning. I’m attacking the Windows Won’t Boot on DDS problem with a vengeance.

DDS doesn’t have a CD, but it does have a diskette drive. I needed to try a full XP recovery-install.

Mmm. I read that Microsoft still offers XP install diskettes. So, I downloaded the official MS application that creates the six (6!) diskettes.

I found 6 old diskettes and carefully formatted all of them. ( One was labelled IBM DOS 6.1 beta. Codenamed Guinan. 1993!)

I then ran the MS program to create the bootable XP install diskettes.

I’m sure I read that they could boot, then do a remote (network) install. Hence I could have the XP install CD shared on my main PC and – via my LAN – boot/install DDS from that.

To cut to the chase, it failed. After manually swapping the 6 diskettes, a brief glimmer of hope when it offered the XP recovery console and even showed me the C: prompt. But then boom, ‘no C drive’ message or something. Another 6swap reboot – and a different menu option – brought up “no CD drive found” and “F3 to exit”. Bang.

Tried a few other things, involving PXE (Pre-boot eXecution Environment, aka ‘boot from network’. Hey shouldn’t that be PEE. I guess not).

The official MS PXE and XP_install seem to want a Windows 2000 server to work. AFAIK. Looked into a few Linux ones, like unattended over at Sourceforge, but nothing seemed to fit.

Beaten! But only this round. Work continues.