upgrading to xp on dell 4100 system?

Quantum12

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Joined
14 Jan 2004
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Ok my buddy bought a dell 4100 system. Has no cd's,software or anything like that. It had windows me on it. He wanted xp on it so I fdisked it and reformatted the hard drive and installed xp on the the drive using my pc because I could'nt get his to boot with cd or with bootdisk. (Note from dell some systems will not boot from cd and the 4100 is one of them) When i tried to run xp setup from bootdisk it kept saying program wont run in dos mode blah blah. So I set up the drive with my pc and when He popped the drive back in his it said cannot find windows me. Its like the pc still thinks it has win me in it. And it says run fdisk. I did all that in the first place. What can I do to fix this. Not sure what model motherboard but I know it has the intel 815E chipset and sure it will run xp with no probs. Any help would be great Thanks!
 
Would fdisk /mbr do the trick? And if so would I have to reformat and reinstall again?
 
dreamliner77 said:
You'll have major issues installing xp on a different computer...


What do you mean? Differant computer. His dell had win me originaly I wiped it out and want to put xp on it.
 
You will have to re-install ME on it, as per original, then you will have to "Upgrade " to XP by dropping the CD in and clicking on "upgrade". That was the only way I could resolve installing XP on an old IBM.

BTW, twenty minutes after completely installing XP on that IBM clunkard, I threw that peice of junk into the trash, phone MS in the morning and got permission to install my XPHome on another machine. Good thing it was free, given to me.


Heeter
 
What I meant was that installing xp on a hdd in another computer and then swapping it to another computer is a bad idea.
 
There is'nt any other way? When my buddy bought the dell it did'nt come with any discs. No recovery disc no win me disc nothing. I geuss I should'nt have reformatted the drive. Unless I get any old win me os and put it back on there. Would that work? And then upgrade it from there. Or would I have to have the dell version of win me?
 
Quantum,

You will need to find a Win98 or WinME with startup floppy for formatting. Just temporary until you "upgrade" to XP. You do not need to find a Dell dedicated WinME.


Heeter
 
for the boot to a cd issue...check the BIOS...boot order...as for the 4100's not being able to boot to a cd...that is false...I had a 4100 and never had trouble booting to a cd or installing xp!!! Check your boot settings in the BIOS
 
Its all good I found a win98 disc and installed that with no probs then upgraded to winxp. I thought the 4100 would boot to cd just not this certain cd I have wink wink. I was looking on the dell site it showed a list of dell systems that boot to cd and the 4100 was'nt listed but anyway who cares I got it going for him. I hate dealing with those stupid dell,hp,gateway,compaq crap. Love my own custom built. Thanks guys!!! :)
 
What you could have also done was:

1. fdisk+format C:
2. run (cdrive):\i386\winnt.exe
3. set-up the computer that way

winnt32.exe and the setup.exe in the root dir of the cd would give you the error that "this program cannot be run in DOS mode", because dos is only 16-bit (winnt32.exe is 32-bit) and obviously cant run windows programs (setup.exe).
 
man oh man just do this .. Take the information of the floppy and transfer it to a cd. Put the cd in then run fdisk from there. It should work good, as long as the cd is bootable.
 

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