Using Wine on Ubuntu to install Windows XP

techman41973 · Post by **techman41973** » Wed Apr 07, 2010 7:11 pm

A friend gave me an old Fujitsu tablet that has Ubuntu/Linux installed.
I want to wipe the system clean and install Windows XP.
I have a Windows XP CD but the tablet PC doesn't have a CDROM drive.
I transfered the files from the Windows XP CD to a USB key. The problem is you can't run the Windows XP setup in the Ubuntu environment and the Bios of the Tablet PC will does not support booting from a USB device.
Can I launch the Windows XP installation setup successfully by running the setup utility from Wine?

Renan Birck · Post by **Renan Birck** » Wed Apr 07, 2010 7:42 pm

Em 07-04-2010 21:11, techman41973 escreveu:

Can I launch the Windows XP installation setup successfully by running the setup utility from Wine?

James McKenzie · Post by **James McKenzie** » Wed Apr 07, 2010 7:57 pm

techman41973 wrote:

A friend gave me an old Fujitsu tablet that has Ubuntu/Linux installed.
I want to wipe the system clean and install Windows XP.
I have a Windows XP CD but the tablet PC doesn't have a CDROM drive.
I transfered the files from the Windows XP CD to a USB key. The problem is you can't run the Windows XP setup in the Ubuntu environment and the Bios of the Tablet PC will does not support booting from a USB device.
Can I launch the Windows XP installation setup successfully by running the setup utility from Wine?

Simple answer: No.

Lengthy answer: You will have to boot the XP disk from a readable
CD/DVD device in order for the installation to be orderly as XP will
reboot your system at least once during the install and keep on trying
to install.

Best solution is to try a single drive install. That is WAY beyond this
mailing list/forum and is described elsewhere on the Internet.

James McKenzie

hellork · Post by **hellork** » Thu Apr 08, 2010 6:12 pm

In the context of wine and XP I have in the past installed XP on qemu for the purpose of testing applications on windows side by side with applications running on wine to see if or how they behave differently.

DaVince · Post by **DaVince** » Sat Apr 10, 2010 11:38 am

QEmu is a virtual machine emulating an entire computer. Wine only interprets and tries to execute Windows binaries - therefore you will NEVER be able to install Windows in Wine.

See Wine as a program to handle Windows apps, not as a means to actually install real Windows.

StringCheesian · Post by **StringCheesian** » Sat Apr 10, 2010 2:35 pm

I believe the question has been misunderstood. I think he's aware that wine is not an emulator.

There are 2 ways to install Windows: boot from the install media, or run the installer within an older version of Windows. If the target partition is formatted and mounted, it might be reasonable for him to hope that the installer running on wine would manage to decompress/copy files and then fail trying to change the boot loader. Maybe then he could manually finish by configuring grub to boot the new Windows.

I'm afraid this plan is the best I can think of to try to install through wine and it's still ridiculously optimistic. Realistically, it would be shocking if the installer actually ran.

I think it would be best to forget wine, and try configuring a virtual machine to access a real partition and install Windows that way.

Again, the reason for all this is that he wants to convert a tablet from linux to Windows, but can't boot from optical media and can't boot from USB.

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Sat Apr 10, 2010 6:20 pm

techman41973 wrote:I have a Windows XP CD but the tablet PC doesn't have a CDROM drive.

The only way you can do what you want is to boot off of usb drive if your laptop supports it. Or take HDD out and put it into the PC with CD-ROM.

There is no way to start windows install from within Linux. First step is to format the drive and install loader, which won't work on live system.