Installing OS from one hdd to another

[Faqt]

Okay, I've been sitting here pondering my question....I'm pretty sure there is a reason this won't work, but for the life of me I can't quite figure out what would stop it from working.

Is it theoretically possible to copy the files from a bootable installation cd onto a hard-drive set as master....so when computer boots it would boot the drive as if it were a cd and allow an installation to be performed onto the slave drive?

[cdstomper]

Not really.

The hard drive that you copyied the files to would have to have an O/S on it already, so it would just boot up normally into what ever O/S you are running and the files you copied from the CD would just be in the folder you copied them to just like all the other files on your box.

You could maybe run setup after your box has booted to get the O/S installed on the other drive but then you might aswell use the cd if your doing it that way.

The reson it wouldnt work is because you need an installed O/S to boot into, if you tried to boot into a partition that just had the image of the cd on it, the BIOS wouldnt know what it was and wouldnt be able to "hand over" the system to anything, so it just wouldnt boot.

To make it boot from anything other than the installed O/S you would need to partition your drive but like I said you would need an installed O/S to hand over to!

Hope it helped!

[SDK]

CdStomper said it. Copying a Bootable CD to a HD doesn't make the HD bootable..

Quick Note for you. Nothing stop you from copying the i386 (For Windows) folder from your bootable CD to your HD and then run winnt.exe from the i386 directory from your HD. I do that all the time. I keep the file there and Windows never ask me for my original cd after!

[Spyder32]

Ahh, thank the lord for Linux and their wonderful .iso file's

[1+1=2]

Ahh, thank the lord for Linux and their wonderful .iso file's

Agree on you with that Spyder, once you go to Linux your sure to never go back to Windows