Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional on a USB stick halts at "Installing Devices"

[christophersacchi]

Any suggestions on how to fix this? I don't get a BSOD on bootup at all.

[Calum]

Could we ask for a little more information please?

Are you trying to install Windows 2000 onto a machine from a USB stick?  Or, are you trying to use a USB stick on a machine with Windows 2000 installed?  It's slightly ambiguous at the minute.
Either way, some information on the machine in question would also be quite useful.
If you could post back with further information, I'm sure someone will be able to assist.

[christophersacchi]

It is to one USB stick partition, from a separate partition on the same drive. Could you help me install it to a drive?

[Salmon Trout]

It is to one USB stick partition, from a separate partition on the same drive. Could you help me install it to a drive?

You have Windows 2000 installation media on a partition of a USB drive? If so, how did you manage that?

[christophersacchi]

I used the program "WinSetupFromUSB" to copy to the install partition. But how would I stop the Windows 2000 partition from halting when it detects devices at the GUI stage?

[Salmon Trout]

Perhaps I didn't ask clearly enough.

1. Did you copy from a pressed Windows 2000 install disk?

2. You do know that you can only install a Windows OS to a fixed internal disk?

[camerongray]

Is there any reason you can't use the physical CD-ROM - This is a lot easier than trying to use a USB drive, especially something old like Windows 2000.

[christophersacchi]

I know but I mainly wanted to install to the USB, not from it.

[patio]

You can't...i mentioned that earlier in Chat.

[christophersacchi]

It's because my HDD is broken. 

[DaveLembke]

You will have to get a new hard drive. Hard drives are cheap. I bought a 120GB IDE Seagate off of newegg as a refurb for $9.99 with free shipping and 1 year warranty for my daughters Pentium 4 HT system. It had 18k hours of use, but was still healthy with no bad sectors etc as tested with Crystal Disk. Ebay is another cheap alternative to a Hard Drive, but be sure it had a warranty to not be DOA.

Microsoft does not allow OS to install to thumb drives to protect from Piracy. If you need an OS that runs off of a USB thumb drive you will have to go with a Linux Distro, with many to chose from, however the computer will not be very fast at tasks as for it has to load over USB the programs to memory. Wanting to run Windows 2000 means that the hardware might be USB 1.0, 1.1, or 2.0. I have tested on USB 2.0 Linux and it works but it is by no means fast even on a quadcore computer everything lags when having to load from the USB stick. Older computers I have that are USB 1.0 or 1.1 dont support booting over USB, but if they did it would be way more painful in lag between slower USB communications as well as the fact that the CPUs are only Pentium III's on these systems. I have Fedora 17 on a thumb drive that works well and supports wifi etc.

[Salmon Trout]

We haven't found out if he got Windows 2000 legally...

[patio]

And we may never know...

Since WinNT was released is when MS decided to cripple Windows from running from external devices...obviously for a reason...
However some Users asking for advice will ignore said advice and attempt to go their own way because they don't like the answers...
Yes..it can be done...No we don't advise that here....i don't think we'll see him anytime soon.....

[christophersacchi]

Just saying, not to reuse an old thread...

I met one of my friends, 2Very_Icey on Minecraft, as a direct result of finding & buying a new hard drive.
Even though I never use that computer anymore, I guess the HDD is a reminder of why a bad thing can turn into a very good thing!

Thank you all for the help!
I will mark this old topic as solved!

P.S: I bought the HDD around January 2014.