I made an nlite boot CD for my Fujitsu Lifebook p1120 (no bootable CD-ROM) and tried booting with a usb floppy drive to install XP. When it starts copying files, I keep getting complaints about "Setup cannot copy the file: XXXX" and I have to keep pressing escape to continue. Is there some change I need to make to the boot floppies to allow for an actual unattended installation?

I tried searching through the forums, but the closest thing I found was something about copying the i386 folder to the HD, renaming the winnt.sif file to unattended.txt (this thread) and launching winnt.exe with some parameters. Would that solve my problem?

Just a little update to the install progress. I decided to esc through the missing files and see what happens. Well, it booted off the HD and started the install against the black backdrop as I had hoped it would, but it did stop and ask me to provide the CD key and owner information (which I had inserted into the nlite image). I played along and fed it what it wanted and it continued happily until it got to "Registers Components" where it threw an error at me "Could not find nlite.inf". After clicking OK on that, it finished fine, but on the first boot, rather than disable the security center and use the user names I had set up in the nlite image, it prompted me for those bits of information. After I got into Windows, I've found almost none of my personalization choices took effect.

About the nliting process, it may be that you've removed too much things, cannot say.

To install on notebook that has no boot from cd support, it is however recommended to use a floppy with any of the programs able to add the booting capability, thus booting directly the CD:
1) grub4dos:
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=5187
2) BCDW - actually the BCDL inside the BCDW download:
http://bootcd.narod.ru/index_e.htm
3) SBM (Smart boot manager):
http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

If I were you I would try using BCDL.

jaclaz

I tried the BCDL method, but the vide_cdd.sys is not able to detect my CD-ROM, so I tried a couple of the other methods indicated on the BCDL site. I have, in the past, had success using the usbaspi.sys driver, so I thought I'd give that a shot, but it doesn't load correctly (the screen glitches and I get a bunch of flashing red blocks everywhere). I dove into the bcdl.bin file to see if I could tweak it and saw the parameters it uses for the usbaspi.sys aren't the same that worked for me previously on this laptop (I have to use the /o switch because of the older USB 1.1 ports). I tried changing it in the .bin file, but naturally, the disk stopped booting.

I'm beginning to suspect I won't get this working just because this laptop is too **** stubborn.

Hmmm, that's strange, I have changed the "command lines" inside it in the past with no errors, see here:
http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=18650

How did you try editing the .bin?

Can you post the line that "normally" works?


However, I am now not so sure to understand your setup, the CD-ROM is also USB?

jaclaz