Another thread linked a procedure of loading XP from the hard drive, that I made into a seperate topic. That thread is here...

Naturally there are many ways to do this, but here's what I did.....

The procedure needs a Floppy or CDROM DOS Boot disc, but I made the HDD a "boot disc" with W98 system files on it... Same difference...

The procedure wants smartdrv.exe on the boot disc. I found to be able to execute smartdrv.exe, himem.sys must be active. This involves also putting himem.sys on the boot disc, but to load it, the config.sys file must have the entry "device=himem.sys" without the quotes, of course.....

Upon booting to the boot disc, smartdrv.exe is executed and then the winnt.exe file is executed that is in the XP installation files that I had previously loaded beforehand, onto the HDD.....

The copy files took about 10 minutes, and then into the Windows setup, took the standard 39 minutes to complete...

Because my HDD was formatted FAT32, I let the installation convert the drive to NTFS.....

It's finishing as I post this topic.....

The reason for putting a Licensed copy of the installation disc on the HDD, and then loading it, is to have the OS have the ability to access the installation files whenever it needed to.... Also just to see if it can be done...