Installing Windows XP without a CD drive
Written by Sam McGeownThis article is now 18 years old! It is highly likely that this information is out of date and the author will have completely forgotten about it. Please take care when following any guidance to ensure you have up-to-date recommendations.
When the Dell engineer said “they’ve asked if you can reinstall the OS” my heart sank. Not because I felt like he was weasling out of work - unusually they were very helpful. Not because installing XP is a hard task, I’ve done it over 100 times on all sorts of hardware.
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<font size="2"><strong>n:\></strong> <em>Aefdisk 1 /delall /formatfat /pri:1024:6 /ext:0:7</em></font>
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<font size="2">Woah woah woah! What’s all that?! The command runs “Aefdisk” on hard disk “1″ with the “/delall” flag, which deletes any exisiting partitions, “/formatfat” which formats the next partition FAT. “/PRI” is a primary partition, “:1024″ is the partition size, “:6″ is the hex partition type which in this case is FAT16 >32mb. “/ext” is an extended partition, “:0″ tells it to use all remaining space on the drive, “:7″ is the partition type which is NTFS.</font>
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