How to use wintoflash to wipe your drive ...

Ever have one of those days? I mean it seemed like a good idea at the time but it soon turned in to a catastrophe.

I have been having problems installing XP and Server 2003 on computers with newer motherboards that use the SATA II and SATA III specification. XP and Server 2003 with SP 1 through SP 3 do not have the drivers for SATA II or III drives (hard, SSD, or CD/DVD) so when you start the install it will hang at the splash screen and never go any further.

This took me about six weeks to figure out, originally I thought that the new Core 2 i Series processor was the culprit until I came across a program called nlite.exe (be careful with this program - there are some that are infected with viruses - only get it from the publishers web site!).

With a lot of research I discovered that the original SATA specification was written with backward compatibility to the IDE interface but the newer SATA II and III specifications are for the ICH only (which is the same as a USB specification for communication between devices). This led me to searching for SATA II and III drivers with the ICH specifications and there are quite a few out there. If you are having problems with a newer motherboard and want to install XP before you wipe the drive check the drivers for the SATA drives in the computer, look at the properties in the Device manager, you are looking for the name of the publisher for that driver. Intel has a lot of different drivers with the ICH specification written in to them.

After making my bootable CD and testing the end product with a slew of SATA II and III drivers on three different computers I was satisfied and decided that I needed a pen drive with the new installation from the cd.

I found a program that will put Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 / 8 / 10 installation media on a usb drive (if it is big enough) and make it a bootable device. Cool.

I wanted to put the install source files for XP and Windows Seven on usb pen drives, sometimes it is faster than a cd/dvd (and some newer computers do not have an optical (cd/dvd) drive!).

It is called wintoflash, I downloaded the program (it is was free) and installed it. Then I put my XP cd in the DVD drive, plugged a 4 Gig Sandisk in the USB port and opened the program.

What I want to do is make the bootable XP OS install on a USB drive. Here are the screen shots of the wintoflash process.

All is good, select the correct drive for the cd and the usb. Opps wrong drive letter. The program wiped my data drive.

Troubleshoot, repair, maintain, upgrade & secure...     With this!

Select the cd/dvd source drive:

Insure that you double check the drive letter, if you change pages the program will revert to the default install drive.

I have written a full review of this program here, if used properly it does work, now to remove the boot cd image from the Sandisk...