One of the few CERTAINTIES of life is that XP does not have DR-DOS code in it. If you cannot boot with a floppy then anything short of a bootable Win98 is out, and if the CDROM is not functioning, then anything else is out as well.

I am unsure of what you got that you DESCRIBED as a "Windows trial". If that is a real XP CD, then you could delete all partitions and start over IF you can get it to boot fromthe CD.

Let us know what you find.



'Trial' was my codename for that which shall not be admitted to in fear of having my *censored* sued senseless. As I said before, this little project is just something that would be sweet if it worked, I'm not looking for some powerhouse software. I don't want to waste money on something if it isn't going to work, so this is a test.

The copy of XP that I had contained Caldera DR-DOS somehow, and it actually gave me a prompt as I stated in my first post. This Windows 98 SE CD obviously doesn't have that, however it gives me the OPTION to boot from CD or my harddrive. When I press boot from CD, it gives me a black screen with a single isolated cursor and starts spinning the CD, then stops and hangs.

I'm going to try a Windows 98 SE boot disk ISO and see how it turns out. If the floppy doesn't work, the same thing on a CD-ROM should work given that the CD drive is operational, in theory.

Edit: Well I almost gave up on the boot iso disk, but at the last minute, it worked. I guess it just needed time on the blank-cursor screen or something, because after about 10 minutes (which is significantly less than the amount of time I waited on the actual OEM's blank-cursor screen) it gave me a boot with CDROM support menu and then some RAM thing, finally ending with a command prompt. I switched to my OEM CD after getting the prompt, then tried an fdisk and it gave me some kind of error reading drive A, so I did a format c:. After it formats, I'll try to continue with the pdf that came with it. Copying the files to the harddrive and such. I'll update if it works or not.

Edit: It almost worked like a charm. During setup it failed to copy some files for some reason (himem.sys, and some serial.xms or something, and vjstick/mouse.vmu), and after reboot, it wouldn't load Windows because of the missing himem.sys. I'm going to format again and try it, hopefully it will copy them correctly, I don't know why it didn't do it in the first place.

Edit: Ah damnit... Now I can't get it to give me the prompt again. It seems as if I pressed a button on the blank-cursor screen and the CD loaded, but now when I press a button all it does is spin the Cd, no menus or anything. I don't know but it's annoying as *censored*. If I can ever get back to the DOS prompt, I can copy the crap to the windows directory and boot off the HDD, but I can't seem to get a prompt *sigh*

Final Edit: Alright, I got it to work finally. Instead of relying on BOOTING off the Win98 CD, I copied the files that made the XP CD boot DR-DOS, then made a CD with all the files that setup claimed it failed to copy. I copied all the files to my harddrive with DR-DOS then booted off my harddrive and it worked. Well, very poorly. Every single thing was broken due to missing drivers so about 5 hours and 10 CD-Rs later, I got Windows to boot correctly. Correctly in the sense that it boots in safe mode by default, and the resolution is the smallest imaginable even though my screen should support higher. My floppy disk drive is broken beyond repair so my only means of communication with other peripherals are a serial port and the CD drive. I'm going to try to install Linux, and then delete Windows.

Thanks for the help guys You may also want to look at the Bios and system updates on IBM's website.