CSCI 2150
Windows XP Installation Instructions

The next PC maintenance and repair topic we will cover is O/S installation, specifically Windows XP. Please realize that it is not the intent of this lab to make sure that everyone is intellectually challenged, rather it is to make sure everyone shares some basic capabilities, namely the ability to install an operating system. The laboratory instructions will take the student through the following steps.

Downloading Installation CD Image

If you followed the correct procedures for getting the MSDN Academic Alliance password, you should have received an e-mail with a subject "Welcome to MSDN Academic Alliance: Online Software System" and a username and password contained within the body of the message. By following the instructions in the welcome message, you should be able to log into the download system using the username (most likely your e-mail address) and password they gave you. If you've already received a MSDNAA account and password for another course, then you will NOT receive the E-Mail containing duplicate account information. If you already have been entered as a user, you will need to use the password that you received for your previous access..

  1. Once you've logged in, you should see a welcome screen. At this screen, click on the blue button labeled "software" which can be found under the heading.


  2. On the new window that comes up, there should be a drop-down box labeled "Search by product title". Click on this box and select Windows XP Professional with SP2 (Single User) ISO Image.

  3. When the product description comes up, it should say that the price is "Free". Click on the icon to add it to your cart.
  4. The next screen is the licensing agreement. After reading and agreeing to the statement, click on the button at the bottom of the screen labeled "I agree".
  5. This should bring up your shopping cart at which time you should click on the icon to check out.
  6. Next, a Customer Information screen should appear. Fill in the requested information and click on the "Next >>" button.
  7. At this point, the details of Your order will appear. Print this out to keep as a copy for your records.
  8. Click on the software title to begin your download.
  9. The next screen should have copy of the serial number you will be using. PRINT THIS OUT TO KEEP AND BRING A COPY TO THE LAB SO YOU CAN ENTER THE SERIAL NUMBER DURING INSTALLATION.
  10. Finally, click on the button labeled "Download Software" to begin your download. THE FILE YOU ARE DOWNLOADING IS NOT THE ACTUAL CD IMAGE. INSTEAD IT IS A PROGRAM THAT WILL BEGIN THE DOWNLOAD FOR YOUR MACHINE.
  11. If you are using Firefox or some other non-Internet Explorer browser to download the ISO image, you may experience a problem with trying to execute the "intermediate executable" that completes the download of the image. If your browser downloads a file called "Windows," try adding an .exe extension to it and running it.
  12. Run the program you just downloaded and follow the Instructions to receive the ISO image.

If the machine you are on has a CD R/W drive, then there should be software available on it to burn CDs. Double-clicking on the *.iso file that you downloaded should automatically start the CD burning software. If not, you may have to start the application from your desktop and select the option to record a CD from a CD image.

If you don't have access to a CD R/W drive, you may have to use one of the Gilbreath lab PCs. I believe the program on the laboratory PCs in Gilbreath is Roxio's Easy CD Creator.

The Boot-up Process

To get started, we need to understand the boot up process of a computer. When you turn on a PC, there is a process that the processor goes through in order to run an operating system such as Microsoft WindowsTM. The general process has the following stages:

  1. Initialize internal processor settings
  2. Execute code from the BIOS or bootstrap
  3. Load operating system
  4. Load higher level drivers

When a microprocessor first boots up, it has no clue. I'm serious. It's dumb as a rock. The first thing it needs to do is bring up its internal circuitry. This is what I'm calling the internal processor initialization. This involves simple things such as setting registers and the bits that control features to their default values. It is important to realize that at this point, the processor doesn't know how to communicate with anything except for a small amount of memory that contains non-volatile code. (Non-volatile means that it doesn't go away when the power goes away. RAM is not non-volatile.)

Once the processor has "come to", it needs to get some basic information such as how to access the hard drive, CDROM, or the floppy drive in order to load an operating system. This may seem trivial to you, but remember, when it first wakes up, the processor is dumb as a rock.

To do this, every PC contains a BIOS. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System, and it contains primitive software that shows the processor how to read from or write to devices such as the hard drive.

Once the BIOS has shown the processor how to access the hard drive or other media where the operating system is contained, the operating system can be loaded. The operating system contains the higher level software that allows the user to do things like:

Once the operating system is running, you need to load the "details". This would include things like software to allow access to "special" drives like a zip drive or a flash RAM. It might also include special drivers for high-performance video cards. In general, the drivers that were not needed for the PC to "come to" need to be loaded now so that the user can have access to them.

Running a Computer Without an Operating System

You can't run a computer without an operating system. So how does a computer with a blank hard drive start so that you can load an operating system? Well, it's going to have to find an operating system on one of the other drives, either a floppy drive, a CDROM, or a Zip drive.

In the past, the BIOS was only capable of seeing either the hard drive or the floppy drive. This was bad. It meant that for a new hard drive, the system had to be brought up using only the floppy drive. Since floppy drives only have a capacity of 1.44 megabytes, and even an old O/S such as Windows 95 took over a 100 megabytes, we had to load a stripped down version of the operating system. (For those of you who are familiar with DOS, the stripped down operating system is almost identical.) Once the stripped down version was loaded, we could then see the CDROM from which we would install the O/S to our hard drive.

Two problems resulted from this arrangement:

To solve this problem, newer PCs have BIOS's that are capable of seeing a CDROM. In our lab, the GX110's have this capability. This will allow us to install the O/S from a CDROM.

Using the process described in the BIOS lab, enter the computer's setup screen. Verify that the computer's boot sequence starts with the CDROM.

  1. Scroll to the field labeled "Boot Sequence".
  2. Press Enter to display current boot sequence.
  3. Highlight the CD-ROM device and use the '-' key to move it to the top of the list. (At least move it above all of the hard drives.)
  4. Press Esc to close the pop-up window
  5. Press Esc again to exit.
  6. When prompted, select the option to "Save Changes and Exit" by highlighting it and pressing Enter.

Installing XP

Upon reboot, the O/S on the CDROM may present you with the message:

Press any key to boot from CD-ROM

Do this, and the PC will load the operating system from the CDROM. Once the O/S is loaded, the program to install Windows XP will automatically be entered. The following is a terse step-by-step account of what you will be seeing.

  1. At the prompt, press ENTER to set up Windows XP.
  2. After reading the Microsoft license, press F8 to agree to it. If you are installing over an existing version of XP, you must press Esc to continue installing a fresh copy of Windows XP.

At this point, you will be presented with a screen to manage the partitions on your hard drive. The screen should look similar to the text shown below. (The details of your screen may differ slightly.)

 Windows XP Professional Setup
================================

   The following list shows the existing partitions and
   unpartitioned space on this computer.

   Use the UP and DOWN ARROW keys to select an item in the list.

      o  To set up Windows XP on the selected item, press ENTER.

      o  To create a partition in the unpartitioned space, press C.

      o  To delete the selected partition, press D.

  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
  |4564 MB Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi                                      |
  |                                                                              |
  |    C:  FAT32                                 1221 MB (    981 MB free)       |
  |        Unpartitioned space                   2343 MB                         |
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  +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

  ENTER=Install  D=Delete Partition  F3=Quit

During the Linux installation lab, we will go into more detail about the use and application of partitions. For now it is safe to simply tell you that a single physical hard drive may be split into multiple logical drives. Each of these logical drives has its own file system, and for all intents appears to be a separate hard drive. Since Windows and Linux have two completely different file systems, they must be on different logical drives. Therefore, we need to take only a portion of your hard drive and assign it to Windows XP so that the remaining portion of the drive can be assigned to Linux partitions.

  1. If your hard drive has partitions that were previously defined (i.e., there are items on the screen other than "Unpartitioned space"), press D to delete each of them. When the new screen appears to confirm the delete, press Enter to confirm. Press L to confirm for a 2nd time.
  2. Once your drive is cleared of all partitions, press C to create a new partition.
  3. Under size of partition, select a number greater than 2000 MB but less than 1/2 of your total drive size. Press Enter to confirm. I cannot stress enough the importance of leaving half of your drive unpartitioned for the installation of Linux. If you do not do this, you will most likely be repeating the lab!
  4. Once a single partition has been created on your drive, press Enter to begin installation.

The next portion of this installation deals with the file system used to store data on your drive. Every hard drive containing data must have a certain amount of data assigned to act as a roadmap to finding files. This roadmap is called a file system. Different O/S's have different file systems. The file system used with older Microsoft O/S's was called a "File Allocation Table" or FAT.

With the advent of Microsoft Windows NT came a new Windows file system, NTFS. This does the same thing as FAT, but with more features. It is vital to note that an O/S using the FAT file system cannot see an NTFS file system. That means that any partition using NTFS cannot be viewed if the machine has been booted using an FAT-based O/S. This usually doesn't cause any problems unless you have a system capable of booting one of multiple O/S's.

Now let's continue with our installation.

  1. When prompted, select NTFS or FAT. I recommend NTFS for our Windows XP installation. The installation process also gives the option for a quick format versus a normal format. A quick format simply initializes the file system. Use a normal format if your drive is new or if you suspect there may be problems with the drive, i.e., bad sectors.
  2. Once you've confirmed your file system selection, the installation program
  3. When the copying of the O/S's files is complete, the PC will reboot. If you didn't remove your CD-ROM, you should get the message, "Press any key to boot from CD-ROM" Don't press a key. After a moment, the PC will boot from new installation.
  4. After Windows XP boots for the first time, setup will spend a number of minutes examining and installing the hardware associated with your PC. Once it is done, it will prompt you for a number of items of information including:
  5. After entering the information from the previous step, set will automatically install networking components. There is no network, so just take the default on all of its questions.
  6. After installation of the network, you will see a number of questions on general configuration. Once again, select the defaults if you are unsure.

After the network installation, the installer will try to connect to the Internet and register with Microsoft. This is a problem as our machines do not have Internet access.

  1. At the "Welcome to Microsoft Windows" screen, click Next.
  2. After waiting for the program to check for internet connectivity, a screen will display "How will this computer connect to the Internet?". Click Skip.
  3. The next screen asks, "Ready to register with Microsoft?". Click the bullet beside "No, not at this time." If you decide to reinstall Windows XP on this drive in the future, you can register then. For now, simply click Next.
  4. Next a screen will ask, "Who will use the computer?". You must enter at least one username and then click Next.
  5. Finally, the "Thank You" screen will appear. Click Next to finish the installation.

That's it! I hope it worked for you!

If you did not have a chance to finish the Windows XP installation lab, you need to take some time during lab hours this week to finish it up.

As for why we need to install an operating system from scratch, if you need to ask that question, you've never had a hard disk crash. And just like riding a motorcycle, it isn't a question of if you're going to have a crash, but when.

Developed by David Tarnoff for CSCI 2150 -- Computer Organization at ETSU