CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

3.1. Understanding Installation Methods

You can use a number of different techniques to install an OS. But before I discuss the actual installation procedures, you should understand the overall approach you will take to install the OS.

3.1.1. Boot floppy

Back in the Windows 9x days, you installed the OS by first booting off your Windows 9x boot disk. The boot disk would contain a number of utilities to help prepare the hard drive for installation. For example, with Windows 98, you would boot off a Windows 98 boot disk, which provided you the fdisk and format commands so that you could partition the hard drive and then format the partitions before starting the installation. In this example, the Windows 98 boot disk also loaded a CD-ROM driver so that you could access the Windows 98 CD and call the setup.exe program to perform the installation.

With today's OSes, such as Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003, you can partition and format the hard drive from within the setup program when installing the OS. This is different than the Windows 9x days because back then, you had to partition the system and format the partitions first. With the newer OSes, you can perform both tasks from within the setup program. So your goal when installing newer OSes is to simply boot from the CD and start the installation.

Today's systems can all boot from CD-ROM or DVD, but in the past, some systems could not. So the folks at Microsoft created a way to produce setup boot disks for Windows 2000. If you have ...