Tricky XP install....

[sjandrewbsme]

My friend's laptop has a defunct CDROM drive and needs a reinstall of XP (I think it's been ruined by Limewire).

I was wondering if I would be able to create a separate partition on his HDD, boot some old bootable DOS floppy, and manually run a copy of an XP install disk (that I copied to his second new partition)?

There are a whole bunch of ways to do this, but I was wondering about this particular method. I've tried booting to his USB chain (it has an option in his BIOS for booting to Removeable Devices") but the devices don't even activate until it's booting XP. I also have no experience with a network install, nor do I want to connect a polluted laptop to my network.

This seems like it would work - copy (he has a working external DVDRW that's connected via USB) all the setup files to a different partition and manually, from the A: prompt, running the setup.exe routine. Am I missing something?

Thanks in advance for your help

 

[Dooyas]

As long as you are hitting F8 or whatever it is on bootup for that particular unit you should be able to show which drive to boot from, which includes USB CD drives. Unless the systems is fairly old you should still be able to do so.

You could also try copying the XP disc onto a USB key. Then either boot from the key and install, or copy it over to the HD and run it from inside Windows. You should also be able to start the install using the CD drive inside windows as well.

 

[Jiggz]

Yes, you should be able to do your option of installing from a hdd. But even better is find out first if the bios has an option of enabling legacy USB devices. This will allow the usb drive to become active even before Win XP installs. If this is not feasible, you can also try booting from a flash drive with copied files of the XP installation CD. Google Bart PE and it discusses other options to boot and install XP besides the CD Rom. And for future installation, your pal can buy a replacement CD rom or CDRW or even DVDRW drive to replace the broken one. Toshiba has a lot of this replacement drives. They are mostly standard in size.