Re: how to install a clean xp on sony vaio

You don't make it bootable (well, you can, but it's extra trouble and not necessary).

Boot from a floppy disc or bootable CD-ROM into DOS. Do the installation to a FAT32 partition (you can convert to NTFS later if necessary). [Alternatively, there are DOS-like environments that have NTFS support, but this is adding unnnecessary complexity.]

Winnt.exe is the DOS mode setup program. Winnt32.exe is the Windows mode setup program.

It normally can't install the "junkies" because they are normally not present in I386; similarly, however, and for the same reason, it also probably won't install either drivers or utilities that are specific to your particular laptop. You have to do that manually, later, after the basic installation is done and bootable {video may be a mess, there may be no sound, operation may be slow as hell unitl you get all of the proper drivers installed, but it should work].


bluetrain wrote:

thank you too for your suggestion :-)


The factory installation probably leaves a folder on the drive called "I386". This folder may or may not be "complete" (it's about a 50-50


I do have this folder, and it appears to be complete. moreover, on the vaio-link site all the device drivers required by my notebook model are available collected in a single zip file, so that i could manually configure each single device.
but if I had to burn an install cd-rom, how to make it bootable ?!? and how to be sure that eventually it won't try to install also the junkies ?!?
just one year ago or more I created a bootable xp cd rom with SP2 included, but as far as I remember it was quite a complex procedure (I don't even rememebr the web where I learned how to make it, I just remember that in some way I ripped a boot sector from the original CD and i used this with nero to burn a new bootable cd with the i386 sp2-updated) 


.

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