OK whew here goes. I am posting this because I googled my problem till I was blue in the face but there are so many guides and forum posts out there. I needed something that was specific to my situation.
I have 3 partitions on my hard drive on my dell desktop. Partition 1 has a successful install of Vista, partition 2 has a successful install of XP from CD. I have dual boot between these 2 using vistas boot manager. (I followed
this guide). Partition 3 is a very small partition, about 8GB, which I set up to test to see if I could install XP from USB drive.
So I have the 2 successful Windows installations on partition 1 and 2, and I have a freshly formatted 8GB 3rd partition ready to try to install XP from USB. (Yes they are all primary partitions).
I followed
this guide to prepare my flash stick. Everything worked fine and dandy, until I got to the GUI portion of the setup (text part worked fine). I rebooted, selected GUI option and got the missing hal.dll error. Then found
this post regarding the error, saying that the error was due to the utility partition that dell puts on there. My utility partition didn't work anyway cuz I screwed it up a while ago, so I deleted it, redid the whole process and when I selected GUI, no more hal.dll error!! But I still couldn't boot into the GUI portion of the setup. This time I select GUI option and I get a black screen with a mouse cursor. It's not a DOS screen with that blinkie thingie up in the left corner, its just a black screen with the mouse cursor on it, and there it stays.
Any suggestions? I have eliminated the possibility that the CD doesn't work by my successful XP installation from XP CD on partition 2. It has to be something with my preparation/copying of files to the flash stick, right? Any suggestions? I have been up in my room for 2 days straight working on this and I want a successful install from a USB drive just because I think it would be cool and it is so much faster. Also, because I have a Dell Mini 9 coming in the mail that I have to install XP on (bought the one with Ubuntu cuz it was cheaper, and I had the XP CD anyway, so why pay the extra $) and those don't have CD drives, and no, I do not have the money to buy a USB external CD drive, plus linux has a lot of issues recognizing USB CD drives. I am pretty much broke after buying the mini.
plz help!