Symptom

When you try to create a Wizard disk using the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard, the option Create a wizard disk in the following drive may be grayed out.

Workaround

This happens if the system has no floppy drive attached, and no other removable drives are present. Please note that the Files and Settings Transfer wizard does not allow saving the Wizard files directory to CD media. To workaround the problem, you may try one of these options:

  1. Create a Wizard disk from another Windows XP system having a floppy drive
  2. Temporarily attach a floppy drive and create a Wizard disk
  3. Use your USB flash drive to create a Wizard disk. USB Flash drives (thumb drives) are extremely cheap nowadays.
Note: You don't need to create a Wizard disk if you already have a retail Windows XP CD. The Windows XP CD contains the Files and Settings Transfer wizard, and its supporting files. Also note that inserting the System Recovery CDs supplied by your OEMs (Dell/Compaq/HP etc) do not help.

More Information

The Wizard disk contains the two files Fastwiz.exe and migwiz.cab. The migwiz.cab is a compressed file, which contains the support files required by the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard. The Wizard files should not occupy more than ~1.2MB of disk space. The Wizard actually gathers the supporting files from the following locations of a Windows XP system, and stores them to a removable disk:

  • %Windir%\System32
  • %Windir%\System32\USMT