Start the
computer and insert your Windows XP CD. After a few seconds, the screen will
clear and you will see a 'press any key to boot from CD' prompt. Press the
any key..... he he, there is no 'any' key,
this is just a test ;)
Press
any key to start the install. The prompt allowing you to install will time
out after about 4 seconds, so if you don't hit any of the keyboard keys you
will have to reboot to install.
The installer program will begin copying files from the CD.
Note: if you are installing WinXP onto
a hard-drive that is not connected to a standard IDE port, for example a SCSI
drive, or an IDE drive connected to a hardware RAID controller, you will need to
press F6 when prompted at the bottom of the screen, immediately after the blue
'windows setup' screen appears. After about 2 minutes, this will bring up a
dialog which allows you to install drivers for your SCSI or RAID device from a
floppy disk. Many computer motherboards have RAID controllers built into them,
so be aware that this may be a required step.
The 'welcome to setup' screen
appears. Press enter to continue. View the licensing agreement and hit F8 to
continue.
The installation program will
then search your drives for any prior installation of XP. If it finds one, you
will be given the option to repair it, which essentially reinstalls most system
files while leaving the registry and installed programs intact. Otherwise, move
forward to the partitioning and formatting section of the install.
The
initial screen
shows the hard disks connected to your system, and any partitions that may
already be created.
A
partition is
simply a section of the free space on your hard-drive. Operating systems use partitions
to logically assign drive letters. For example, if you have a single 40GB
drive, you can allocate all the space to a single partition, but then you could
only have a single drive (C:) visible in Windows.
If you chose
to divide that 40GB into 4 different 10GB partitions, you could have 4 individual
drives (say C:, D:, E:, and F:) within your Windows environment. Essentially,
Multiple partitions allow multiple logical drives within a single physical
drive, and can even allow different operating systems to co-exist on one
drive if desired. Once a partition has been created, it must be formatted to be
useful.
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