theindigogirl said:
Hi there,
I have a laptop with a floppy drive but a faulty CD drive and want to
install Windows XP on it. It is connected over a LAN to a computer with
CD-drive. Can I install XP over the network??
Any help would be appreciated! Thanks.
VA
Here is a simple way:
1. Buy a USB case for a 3.5" disk. They cost less than $20.00.
2. Install the laptop disk in this case.
3. Connect the disk to some Win2000/XP PC.
4. Create a FAT32 partition of at least 10 GBytes on this disk,
preferably 15 GBytes.
5. Copy the whole WinXP CD to the \386 folder on this partition.
6. Put the disk back into the laptop.
7. Boot the laptop with a Win98 boot disk (
www.bootdisk.com)
8. Run smartdrv.exe, then c:\i386\winnt
9. Install WinXP.
10. Later on you can convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS if you wish.
As a general thought: If your laptop is fast enough to run WinXP
then its life expectancy is such that the absence of a CD drive
will cause you a lot of incovenience. Consider biting the bullet
and buy a replacement CD drive, or at least an external USB CD drive.
