First off all, when you say harddisk i guess you mean my usb device wich is not a harddisk but a usb memory stick. Second a correction my stick is seen as removable in windows. 1. On my stick i have boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect (without these i could not boot at all to setup XP ? 2. On my laptop here at work the internal laptop hd is listed in txt mode setup as C: second - My usb device is seen as D listed first. I select the internal hd and completely delete the partitions. leaving me with one disk unpartioned space. then i select that disk and quick format it as NTFS. 3. There is no more partitions left after my procedure. so XP gets installed to a clean single partition. 4-5 i will get back to you with this info. Oh and i suddenly got to think of that i have DPdriverpacks added, the dp driver gets unpacked at first stage of xp GUI setup - unpacking drivers. This is before the actual GUI XP setup screen is visible. Can these cause the prestup.cmd not to run ? Many thanks for the help. Im doing a new install right now to recheck.