Originally Posted by status1

I was just wondering if xp can be copied to another partition without any cloning software or installing xp from cd

I see a lot of people are having problems installing xp without a cd on their laptop so I was wondering if it can be done just by making a separate partition and copying xp from one partition to another or to a second hard drive and set up a dual boot

This is a pretty sick way to install xp and probably won't help those that can't boot into xp at all. It's also probably not a good idea if you have some files that you want to keep

This whole idea got me thinking about what are the minimum files required to boot xp
So I have this old pc with an AMD 1Ghz cpu where I have a dual boot windows 98/xp that I am experimenting with. A couple of months ago I messed something up on xp and I didn't know how to repair it and it was running kind of slow so I installed xp again on a second hard drive and managed to fix the first one.
Then I deleted xp from the second drive but it still shows up on the boot menu
So this past weekend I selected the xp that pointed to the xp that was on the second drive and I got an error message saying that the hal.dll was missing or corrupt
I was also doing some reading on the net about what makes xp boot and this was one of the files needed Then after booting into the working xp I copied the hal.dll to the empty drive to a folder I made to look like the working xp directory
Then the next file needed was the ntoskernel so I installed that and to make a long story short I ended up with some weird looking desktop I guess it's called the classic desktop. Just flat blue About the only thing that worked was the
folders so you can copy files. I see all the programs from the working xp listed
in the control panel under add remove programs So I guess those got copied over from the working xp

So as you can imagine it's going to take a lot of cleaning and tweeking to make it a viable xp but so far it seams to be working in a kind of rough format

I was wondering if anyone else tried to install it this way and how did it turned out ?