Installing Windows without CD drive or bootable USB support.

Ali195 · 2 Aug 2011 at 21:48

Ok so a friend has given me an old Sony laptop (must be 10 years old because it has WinME on it).

It has no CD drive, BIOS/boot options are HDD, Optical (he lost the external CD drive & i dont have one) & Floppy (dont have a floppy disc).

So.....i have a 10GB HDD & Windows XP iso image.

Ali195 · 2 Aug 2011 at 23:14

No PXE in bios im afraid...super basic.

Now the simple way would create two partitions, one 700MB (give or take) & the remaining 9GB ish. Put the extracted XP installation in the 700MB part, boot off a Win98/2000 floppy then run the install from DOS...install to 9GB. But no floppy disc.

...must ...solve. Reminds me of my old college days.

Ali195 · 2 Aug 2011 at 23:31

Interesting, i've never used grub before & always associated it with MAC's. The website is a little quirky. What exactly does it do? Does it create some kind of boot loader after POST/ahead of Windows?

Ali195 · 4 Aug 2011 at 20:54

And so it continues.....

So i borrowed a 8xDVD-ROM USB drive from work & guess what ....the mo fo BIOS doesnt like it. Simply ignores the drive apon boot. Select ATAPI CD-ROM on the boot menu....two blinks & boots off HDD. Disc tested fine on my PC ..booted off it fine using the same drive.

BUT i have a working CD drive in Windows, just not bootable. So ...i looked into the GRUB thing but i see all this talk of, boot off linix live CD.... stopped at that point.

Davefran, i had also had the idea of spoofing a CD-ROM drive but no hopes if it doesnt pickup the real thing.

Ali195 · 12 Aug 2011 at 10:29

This laptop is starting to p*ss me off. So while visiting the folkes back home i dug out my old Dell XP laptop (that has wifi & DVD-ROM drive).

So i swap the HDD's over fine. Installed XP onto the 10GB partition.

Swapped them back again but after POST the screen goes black. No XP splash screen but i can see the backlight is on.

Can get the Advanced Options Menu. Tried VGA mode, safemode (just pauses with the list of drivers), last know good config etc.

So i put in the HDD of the Dell laptop in to see what happens but same thing, which is odd. In the Dell laptop i can go through the full setup up all the way to desktop. Now i'm thinking of trying Linux for a test. Any suggestions as its been years since i installed Mandrake in 2002?

Ali195 · 12 Aug 2011 at 10:34

Now to the haters, yes i could give the laptop back to my friend but i'd be disappointed i couldnt solve it. **** i could even give them this old Dell laptop but that would be too easy.