Thanks for the explaination of the acronym. I looked at the status of my ODD via the device manager (the only way I know how to test it) and it reports that the device is working properly. I'll try to give you a little more info. I didn't select 'Text mode' as suggested in the official tutorial here:
"If you previously had to use the F6/floppy method to get access to your hard disk during Windows setup, make sure you select the Mass-Storage driverpack as well as check the "Text-Mode" option. Text-Mode integration will ensure that your RAID, IDE or SATA controller is correctly identified and supported by the Windows installer prior to installation. In other words, TEXTMODE is required if the Windows installer CD does not recognize your destination hard drive.
Select Text-Mode and you are saying "Bye Bye, Floppy".
for the following reasons:
1) I've never installed Windows XP on my machine because it came ready installed and I've never had to reinstall it, therefore I've never used the F6/floppy method and wouldn't know if I had to or not?
2) I do have a floppy disc drive installed on my machine, which I do not want to say 'Bye Bye' to. However, my computer did not come with any floppy discs that were needed for the installation to complete.
Looking at the sentence which mentions, "...your RAID, IDE, SATA controller is correctly identified...." I think I may have misunderstood here, so maybe I did need to tick this box, I'm still not sure?
At this point it may be worth me mentioning that I created the original image on my old PC. I then transfered this image to my new PC which has a DVD writer and tested it as virtual installation on 'Sun VirtualBox' which seemed to work fine.
I did as was suggested to me in the earlier post and burnt the image again using a slower speed and the disc was verified as ok. I then attempted to boot with it in the old PC's DVD drive. I pressed F11 during the setup to ensure my machine booted from the DVD drive. Eventually the Windows Setup screen was presented and the drived wizzed away for what seemed to be a long time and then displayed the following message:
Please insert disk labelled
Windows XP Home Edition SP3 CD into Drive A
Press enter when ready
Drive A is my floppy drive, so I ignored it and pressed enter anyway. The same thing happened again, so I exited and rebooted. I pressed F11 again during the boot sequence and changed the boot device to the hard drive. Whilst the machine was booting I pressed any key when given the option to boot from CD. Again the machine took ages and finally I was presented with the following message:
INF file txtsetup.sif corrupt or missing, status 8192
Setup cannot continue
Press any key to exit
So, I tried a third time using the last method described and got the following message:
File/i386.biosinfo.inf could not be loaded. The error code is 2
Setup cannot continue
Press any key to exit
And that brings me to where I am now. I don't have clue what's going on? Please help?
David