virtualbox.org

My mom has this old Inspiron 6000 laptop running on XP MCE. The installation is horribly messed up and chkdsk is freaking out about the drive, so I can't fix anything. Conveniently the optical drive is broken, so I can't use the installation disk. My mom needs the XP installation for Visual Studio, so I have to reinstall it. I've pulled the hdd out (which contains XP MCE and Ubuntu 11.04, which I installed for my mom so the computer can still be usable) and stuck in a USB enclosure and managed to mount it as a raw disk into a virtual machine in vbox 4.0.8 (not OSE) on my Win computer. I'm considering reinstalling XP onto the hard drive in the virtualbox (using my computer's optical drive to read the installation disk), then putting the hard drive back into her computer. The installation disk I have is from Dell.

Is reinstalling XP like this advisable? I'm worried about it messing up my Win7 computer.

ThX

You don't have to worry about your own installation. What you do have to worry about is the activation of Windows (that's done by the system BIOS, but that's not available in VB) and the drivers. Windows gets very upset if you install it on one set of hardware (the virtual environment VB provides) and then dump it on completely different hardware (the laptop). You will probably waste more time trying to fix that, than to get the recovery disc onto a USB flash drive and boot from that to install the OS.

So instead of using VB for your reinstallation, you're better off figuring out how to get the CD onto the USB stick and boot the laptop from that. Another thing that you could do, which requires some more work and knowledge, is boot the laptop through PXE to install the OS on the hardware directly, in case it can't boot from USB.
Oh, that reminds me, you can in fact install Windows XP from the hard drive directly if you put the install media on the hard drive and boot it from the hard drive directly. There should be a DOS installer for it.

Anyway, you have plenty of options and a direct installation is better than going through VB and put the hard drive back into the laptop. Also consider the age of the hardware, it's possible the hard drive is failing as well. Chkdsk would've fixed the problems if it was 100% fine.

How does one put the installation disk and boot from it? I've attempted to create a bootable USB but the Inspiron refuses to load everything properly. it just reboots after ramdisk is loaded.
ANd the hard drive is ok. it passed both the short and long tests from Seagate's hdd utility.

Much appreciated

Well, you have RAW disk access to it, so if you can format it as FAT32 for a part (or entirely) and put the install disk on it, along with some system files like command.com to make it look like a bootable drive, you're pretty much good to go. Using NTFS is better for the Windows partition, but it can also be FAT32. If you install on the same partition, you won't be able to format it, but that's a minor thing, not very important.

You can go your way first and see how it goes, then you can always use other means to install it.

like using xcopy to copy the contents of the installation dvd to the hdd?

The hard drive first needs to be bootable, then you can copy the install files to it with whatever you want.