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Having trouble using a USB floppy drive when using an answer file for installing XP

Hi all,

For my job i install windows a lot. This can be on a whole bunch of different hardware platforms, but it is always XP.

I use an answer file on a floppy to automate the install. This works well for me.

I am coming across more and more machines that have no floppy drive in them so i want to use a USB floppy drive or a USB pen drive.

When i tried the USB floppy drive this didnt work even though USB support was enabled in the bios.

Any ideas how i can fix this?

TIA

trenes

Hi satmanuk,

Just a side track here.
Do you have dhcp, dns, and a bit of hardrive space?
Then maybe http://unattended.sourceforge.net/step-by-step.php this is something you want to look into.
(I have never used it!)

I use PING (but that I use only for network imaging, so when a user messes up her/his pc all I do is "clicker di click"and the OS is reinstalled.

As for your problem the only thing I could think of is enabling usb floppy support and you already did that.

Cheers!
regards,

Trenes

bwhittenberger

the problem is probably because the usb drivers are not loaded when windows is installing. I had this problem when I used ghost from a floopy booting into dos. I had to load a usb driver for dos to see the usb drive. I am not sure how you would make this work with xp loading. Can you modify the boot process to include the usb drivers maybe?
your bios will see the usb drive but windows is not seing it because it has no drivers loaded for it at this point.

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Ryan_R

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satmanuk

ASKER

Cool i have heard other good thigns about nlitw so i plan to use this then sysprep the machine for th end user experience once finished.

Thanks all.

Ryan_R

Thanks for the points.