How to instal windows xo without a CD drive ?

Ady2009 · 29 Sep 2010 at 21:01

Hi guys

Here is my problem. I have got a old laptop with a busted CD drive which I really don't want to fork out to replace until I know that the laptop is in working order. The laptop does not have a operating system loaded on it. I have a windows XP cd but has anyone got any ideas how to get the OS on the laptop without a CD drive ?. I have already tried putting the hard drive in a desktop but there seems to be some kind of seciruty on it preventing it being installed in a different machine as it isn't recogninsed at all. I have reformated the drive with a win98 boot disk and all is ok.

Thanks

Infam0us · 29 Sep 2010 at 21:06

Ady2009 · 29 Sep 2010 at 22:11

Unfotunaly the lapotp is too old to boot from USB

Infam0us · 29 Sep 2010 at 22:25

External USB CD Drive then

Insta · 29 Sep 2010 at 22:33

can install it from about 8 floppy disks, good luck.

this_is_gav · 30 Sep 2010 at 07:09

Insta said:
can install it from about 8 floppy disks, good luck.

You can't, that just loads the installer for PCs which wouldn't allow you to boot from CD. You still need a CD drive.

It may allow a USB CD/DVD drive to work though.

Jokester · 30 Sep 2010 at 07:23

Install XP on it in another computer then put the drive into the laptop?

Ok the drivers will be messed up, but it might still boot into windows and sort itself out.

steve258 · 30 Sep 2010 at 07:43

Jokester said:
Install XP on it in another computer then put the drive into the laptop?

Ok the drivers will be messed up, but it might still boot into windows and sort itself out.

Unless the spec of two pcs are similar it would most likely just bluescreens tbh. No harm trying though.

eXor · 30 Sep 2010 at 09:05

Preparation
-----------
1. Make the laptop's hard drive bootable using a Win98SE boot disk.

2. Create and format a FAT32 partition to hold your XP install ( C:\ )

3. Copy the XP CD contents to a directory on the hard drive. Somehow.

4. Copy Win98SE's smartdrv.exe to the hard disk ( The install will be painfully slow, if you don't use this ).

Install
------
1. Boot from the hard disk ( into Win98SE DOS environment )
2. Run smartdrv.exe
3. cd to the i386 directory ( under the XP CD directory e.g. c:\xpcd\i386 )
4. Run winnt.exe
5. Convert C:\ to NTFS, once booted into XP. ( Will it set sane permissions on system folders, as if you had installed directly to NTFS? )
6. Smile

EDIT: Some additional thoughts.

Surprised that the hard disk was not recognised in another system. What kind of hard disk is it? IDE or SATA?

Here is a link discussing USB support under DOS, http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

You could also try acquiring a SATA/IDE-to-USB cable. Bought one ages ago ( for under 5 pounds, IIRC ). You can then pull the laptop's drive, and hopefully it will be recognised as a USB device when you attach it to another PC.

Slightly more difficult... you could try a floppy based Linux distribution. One which has support for USB / SATA / IDE. You could then boot up with a flash disk / USB Hard disk / USB CD-ROM / USB DVD-ROM attached and copy the XP CD files across. Which distribution? Don't know, as I said goodbye to evil floppies many years ago.

Google is your friend.

Ady2009 · 30 Sep 2010 at 11:01

Thanks for the advice. I have been doing a bit of reading around and I think the best way is to find a boot floppy with usb support to allow me to get access to a pen drive. Does anybody know of a good one ?

I was suprisd that the drive was not recognised in my desktop, i've never had pproblems with laptop drives before, just plug in the adaptor on a spare ide cable, check it is set to slave and away we go. This time it was not even registering in disk management. I did a google for the hard drive model number and apparently other people have also been having the same problem. It is locked to the computer somehow. The drive is ok as I have just reformatted it in dos.

Toughnoodle · 30 Sep 2010 at 13:58

I had this problem with some tablet PCs a while back (no CD drive at all and an external one wouldn't boot). I ended up making them boot from the network and installed XP from there. There are loads of walkthroughs via google.

KatanaDV20 · 30 Sep 2010 at 14:51

Hey dude..... if you have tried installing XP and its not working...

Chuck Linux Mint on it.

Im no Linux expert but this is a **very** user-friendly distro and comes loaded with everything including Open Office etc. The layout is just like Windows...taskbar...start menu on left corner...clock on right...Im very impressed. I use it on an ancient computer I keep downstairs just to watch iPlayer,YouTube etc. and it runs brilliantly.