WinXP install files

[drewbob]

Whenever I am installing windows 98 (or 95) for anyone, I like to make a seperate small partition on the hard drive to copy the Win98 directory to from the cd. Once the cab files are on the drive, it is never necessary to go get the media when files or a clean install is necessary. Can I do such a thing with XP?

[Rick]

By Default XP does that also.
But it places the files in a folder on the install drive not another partition

I have never had to place my XP disk in the drive for anything after the first clean install..
Even the sp1 does it as well

[Paul Komski]

You can run the installation from the HDD if you want or need to but it is not identical to installing Win9X this way, since you will not be able to run setup from DOS on a boot diskette as you would with Win9X.

Instead, copy the whole i386 folder to the hdd and then run winnt.exe from within it from a Win98 startup diskette (or similar).

;)

[drewbob]

One of the reasons I want to do this is that I will not have access to the media I installed off from after I go off to college in a month. I never thought I would be prompted to put in the disk, but a while back when I went to set up faxing, it asked me to pop in the cd. Do you know if something like those files it needed to set up faxing would be included in the i386 directory, or would it be located elsewhere on the cd?
BTW don't worry, my copy of XP is legit - my cousin owns 5 licenses and said I could use one, but explicitly asked me not to burn a copy of the media, even for backup purposes, because she said it violates the license agreement.

[Paul Komski]

Copy the other folders over as well if you want to - there's not that much space involved anyway.

Its unlikely you will ever need to access them, unless you want to install any of the third-party or other "value-added" stuff.