Installing Windows XP

by Steve Kerrison on 25 July 2005, 00:00

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The Final Reboot

Your computer will reboot once more and now we're on the last leg of the setup process.

You'll usually find XP wants to up the screen resolution a little bit. Click OK... it's not like you have much choice. You'll then get another button to click, confirming that the resolution change went OK. If it doesn't, just sit and wait and it'll rollback to the original resolution.

There's another short wait to endure, while the wonderful 'welcome to windows' animation launches. From here on in it's friendly questions like 'do you want to register?' and 'what are the names of the users of this computer?'. You have successfully installed Windows XP.

Now there's the need to install extra drivers and software. You'll find further guides covering some of these in the future, so keep a look out for them. Until then, I hope this proved useful for you first time system builders and OS installers.

Notes

Just for those interested, I took these screenshots using Virtual PC (now owned by Microsoft, but at the time owned by a company called Connectix.) I did this when I was at college, but hung onto the screenshots in the knowledge that they'd become useful again and here's the proof. The version of Windows XP I installed was Windows XP Professional, and it was a volume edition, which is why you saw mention of "volume license key" in the CD-Key screenshot. There are a few differences between different versions of XP. But the installation process is essentially the same, so this guide should help you no matter what version of XP you're installing.



HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Good guide. But for most intent and purpose, I would think that most people who've built a PC would have no difficulty going through the relatively simple procedures installing Windows ;)
Its only marginally harder than installing most applications… just more time consuming. IMHO that is.

But I would like to point out one issue I've encountered when I installed my Windows XP. It appears to me that even SP2 lacks SATA support straight out of the box/CD case. Meaning that for my install (and it appears other people online when I googled the issue), I had to provide a floppy disk with SATA drivers. This is fine and not a big issue, except that my floppy disk is now behaving a bit oddly, and I intend to phase out this venerable storage device on the next PC I build.

I vaguely remember reading somewhere that you can create your own custom installation CDs (for personal use, of course), to include additional drivers on it. Does anyone know of anything on this matter?
TooNice - I have over my time on these forums seen many XP Installation queries so I think it's necessary that we have this guide and those who haven't installed XP before will see a benefit.

As for 3rd party RAID/ATA/SATA drivers, I have an article on that ready to go too, so you'll see that soon!

And yes, you can include applications and drivers in the XP install CD just like you can new service packs, something which I may do a writeup on, although it is reasonably well documented already
Kez
you can include applications and drivers in the XP install CD just like you can new service packs, something which I may do a writeup on, although it is reasonably well documented already

Yeap theres loads of slipstream guides which show how to include SP2 and SATA drivers onto the CD so you can finally ditch the floppy :)

The one I found to be most helpful ( other words it has more pictures :D ) is the following ;

http://www.maximumpc.com/2005/01/how_to_slipstre.html
Great timing! I am actually have problems with installing XP on my SATA Westeren Digital Raptor.

I press F6 and can do the first couple of steps, but XP setup then says it cannot find any mass storage devices. I have download and tested the HD with the WD drive tools and it passed all the tests.

Any suggestions? I tried searching for specific drivers for my HD to load during the install, but could not find any.