VOGONS


First post, by xjas

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Like the title says. Is there any way to burn a bootable install of Win 98 (or 2000 or XP for that matter) with a bunch of drivers onto a DVD that I can use in a system without a hard drive? I could use a temporary HDD to set Windows up with all its drivers & software, and then burn that whole config to a disc, but I'm not sure what needs to be on there in terms of system files to make it bootable, or how not to make Windows throw a hissy fit.

I could even see sticking a RAMdisk & copy script in the Autoexec.bat so it has somewhere to write files to and use as scratch space. I have way more SDRAM and DDR than I have spare HDDs. 😜

Basically I want to roll my own "Puppy Windows." This seems like it should be possible; anyone done it?

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Reply 1 of 4, by oeuvre

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Closest thing I know to a bootable live Windows is Mini Windows XP that comes with Hiren's Boot CD.

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Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

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^Me, too. If it was an USB pen drive instead of a DVD, I could recommend Rufus.
It has the ability to make the boot medium appear as a hard disk/supper floppy thing.

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Reply 3 of 4, by xjas

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Yeah, using Hiren's is where I got the idea. Would be nice to have a more generic edition.

I have a few beige towers around with suitable hardware but I'm LONG out of suitable IDE HDDs, and don't feel like going out of my way to get more. Was thinking to put a few games on and make a portable LAN party boot disc. 😜

I'm definitely going to keep looking into this, and will post my findings if I figure out how to do it...

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Reply 4 of 4, by bakemono

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i don't know anything about bootable CDs, but I like your idea of using a ramdisk. install windows, zip it all up, then on your disc extract it to the ramdisk in autoexec.bat before executing WIN? Might work, if no problems with long filenames. I once saw someone run win3.1 from a zipdisk. on the other hand, using a disk image might work better than an archive

if the problem is lack of IDE HDDs, how about using compact flash cards instead?