Cant boot to cd, will 2 diskettes?

I know I can make a series of 4 boot disks to do a clean install of 2k...can I do that with xp home also...
For some reason, My cd isn't recognized until after windows loads...Bios says the cd isn't installed yet. When I made the diskettes for 2k, I could boot to those, then finish up on the 2k cd....I am at a loss on how to install XP this way...Could someone offer me some assistance plz.?

 

Ty Ty Ty

 

You can also use the old faithful Win98 boot floppy. It will recognize the CD-ROM drive so you can get resident in the I386 folder and type winnt.exe to start the install. Be sure to get a boot floppy that loads smartdrive in the process since it will speed the file copy process along quite a bit. If you have no existing fat32 partitions, you will have to either create a small fat32 partition for a swap file or else (preferred method) format the drive in fat32. If previously formatted in ntfs, use fdisk to repartition and then format in fat32. Not to worry, XP will offer to change it later during the early install stages. The boot floppy will have those tools. There are several good versions available at bootdisk.com.

HTH

EDit, I see they are charging a fee for the floppy now.

 

I see bootdisk.com is now charging a modest fee for their XP install floppy. If you still want a freebie one from a different author, you can get one here. I have no quarrel with anyone making a buck to keep their site afloat but just thought I'd give an alternate source for those who need it.

I see they also have an ISO file for creating a bootable CD for XP and Vista installs. Nice to know since the computer with floppy drives are getting rarer as time goes by. I think I'll DL one before they start charging for it.