How to boot with hard disk

Question

Errr. How to boot from hardisk(Non portable)

i was thinking tht very time i format my Windows,i had to arrange a Cd or keep a Cd handy with me in a safe place o boot from it

But i noticed in my bios a option to boot from hard disk

SO,

I want to know how can i boot from it,i hav only one HDD and i hav a partion with 10GB free space and nothing else is kept there

So now can i boot from tht partion or not

(Remember i just want to install or put only this installation which with me and also this Cd has no conents like SETUP or AUTORUN,so this only for booting a fresh copy only,not for installing it with Any earlier Windows,i want to use only this way only)

If not then tell me an idea to boot from a Pen drive(i hav 1Gb),Dont give me any idea regarding using pe BUILDER or somewht like tht.Im using WinXp sp2 Cd which i dwnlded and was gr8 as it has WMP11,IE7 inbuilt and was tweaked for a better performance,

(Remember i just want to install or put only this installation which with me and also this Cd has no conents like SETUP or AUTORUN,so this only for booting a fresh copy only,not for installing it with Any earlier Windows,i want to use only this way only).

Answer 1

Do you know when you power on your computer without inserting any CD, pen drives, network connection, etc, You're actually booting from hard disk. If not, how do you explain the windows logo show up?

So, the thing you can do is to change the boot sequence. If you put in this order "CD/DVD drive, USB drive, Hard Disk, Network" it will go like this logic

bootable disk not found... skip

bootable usb device not found... skip

bootable disk image found... loading... OK

(network is skipped, of course)

If you put a bootable CD inside, the logic change to

bootable disk found... loading... OK

(everything else is skipped)

Hope you get the picture.

-Rufas

Answer 2

The option Boot From Harddisk sets the priority of the drives to boot.The drive can be hdd,cdrom,network etc. It is the sequence through which the system boots in order.

When u select boot from hard disk then the system reads from the Master Boot Record(MBR) of the harddisk where the boot information is stored which is required by the system to start operating system. This is same for cdrom also.

You cannot store the contents of xp cd in your hard disk for future installation of opearing system fro hard disk as the the cd boot information is not written on the MBR of the hard disk because cd have zipped installation files which is extracted and executed by the set-up only.