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HP Laptops, among others, don’t ship with install discs for Windows. Instead they insist that you burn a “Recovery Disc Set” from within Windows which helpfully splits the contents of a locked Recovery Partition onto ~7CDs (or, for me, a couple of DVDs). Predictably this Recovery Disc Set includes all the “awesome” software that ships with HP laptops (bringing the total size of the discs to > 6GB).

Cutting out the crap and getting a plain-jane Windows install disc from these Recovery CDs is an enormous pain in the arse. If your lucky, you have a copy of the version of Windows (XP Home, XP Professional or one of the many versions of Vista) that your laptop shipped with. If, like me, you don’t, then life can get kinda painful if you want to do a clean install.

I spent ~4hours yesterday using a combination of cloned hard drives, Mac and Linux OSes, chmod’ing, chown’ing, unlocking files and folders and merging burnt DVDs into a single folder to try and reconstruct a valid WinXP Home install disc. None of this worked. I’m no expert, but if I can’t do it then I imagine most people would struggle. The smart move would have been to just use the recovery DVDs for their intended purpose. But I didn’t want that. I wanted a plain-old Windows install disc that I could throw at nLite.

Fortunately for me (and who knows, maybe everyone in this unfortunate situation) I realised that the machine that I was rebuilding had an i386 folder in the root of the C:/ drive. Once I had this folder (I knew it had to be ~450MB, and it was) I knew I was in the money. If you find yourself in this situation then follow these steps:

Copy the i386 folder to a new folder somewhere. In your new folder you need to create the WIN51, WIN51C (or WIN51P for XP Pro) and (possibly) WIN51C.SP2 (or, again WIN51P.SP2) files. These files are just text files (without the .txt extension, obviously) that have the word “Windows” (minus quotes) followed by a single white space on the first line and then a blank second line. So, if you weren’t paying attention, you type W.i.n.d.o.w.s. then press space once and then return, once (or get these files from somewhere else if this sounds too difficult).

Once you have these files you can point nLite at your new folder and away you go. One trick for new kids: The WinXP setup program needs drivers for some SATA hard drives. Download the right ones for your system while it is still functioning and use nLite to include them in the install disc. You know you have done it wrong if the WinXP setup programme says something like: “This system has no available hardrives so setup cannot continue”.

There is other stuff on a WinXP install CD but I can live without it. I’m currently in the process of installing drivers for the HP hardware, but then I have a cloned copy of the hard rive pre-intervention, so I can’t imagine this will take too long.

Famous last words.

My experiences installing MediaWiki on the Pollen Botany Server. This article continues Installing Ubuntu Server on Pollen v2.0.

Here are some notes from my re-install of Pollen Botany Server using Ubuntu 8.04 Server, MediaWiki 1.12.0 and Webmin 1.410. This article is continued by Installing MediaWiki on Pollen v2.0.

A useful resource for making Phosphate Buffers. Very handy for red seaweed pigment extractions.