Installing windows on a laptop with no network/cd/fdd

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danfaulknor

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#29607 13-Jan-2009 12:22

Hi All,

I have a laptop here, with a blank 40gb hdd, and i want to isntall windows xp on it, but:
It doesnt have a cd/network or fdd (has usb, but no usb boot)
I also dont have any other laptops that take IDE drives, so i cant put it in there. Nor do i have any computers with cdrom chipsets that a dos bootdisk would support.
Does anyone have any suggestions?

Cheers

they/them

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manhinli

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#189176 13-Jan-2009 12:25

The only way I can see would be to get the laptop hard drive out and install it from a different computer.

What year/generation is the laptop from?

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danfaulknor

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#189178 13-Jan-2009 12:28

900mhz celleron, 192mb ram

Give you an idea?

I dont have any pcs that i could set it up in

they/them

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trig42

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#190306 18-Jan-2009 08:17

I think you are pretty stuck.
The only thing you could try is taking the hard disk out of that laptop, partitioning it so there is a small partition at the front (say 2Gb) and setting that partition up as a boot disk using the boot disk images for windows XP, then copying the XP cd over to that disk.

Then you would hope that the laptop boots that disk, and you can run XP setup off the HDD. Problem is that the XP bootdisks are a 4 or 5 floppy set, whether you can get that onto the HDD as bootable I don't know.

You can use a 98 boot disk too and run Smartdrv (disk caching) - there is a guide here http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/578/windows-xp-installing-from-harddrive/

You do need to get that HDD out and plugged into another PC first though

LennonNZ

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#190308 18-Jan-2009 08:29

Installing over the network is quite easy. Your laptop will most likely support PXE

See: http://www.lockstockmods.net/2008/04/26/easy-way-to-pxe-boot-windows/

Thanks