Laptop Upgrade Problem

[flyer]

I have a 5 year old Compaq Presario 17XL360 laptop that came with ME on a 10
GB HD. I upgraded to XP Home and stupidly tossed the ME disk. Recently I
decided to upgrade the HD to a new 40 GB WD. Now I seem to remember this
laptop will not boot to the DVD-ROM. How do I format my new HD? And how do
I install an OS on this laptop?
Thanks,

 

[Rock]

I have a 5 year old Compaq Presario 17XL360 laptop that came with ME on a
10 GB HD. I upgraded to XP Home and stupidly tossed the ME disk. Recently
I decided to upgrade the HD to a new 40 GB WD. Now I seem to remember this
laptop will not boot to the DVD-ROM. How do I format my new HD? And how
do I install an OS on this laptop?

It's not clear what you are wanting. You have a laptop with a 10GB hard
drive and want to swap out with a new 40 GB drive and have it run the
windows installation that's currently on the smaller drive? When you say I
recently upgraded the HD to a new 40 GB drive does that just mean you bought
one but haven't done anything with it?

To clean install your upgrade copy of XP on the new drive you'll need a
qualifying product CD to insert in a CD Drive when asked for during
installation. If you tossed yours borrow one or buy one cheap on Ebay. You
will need a working optical drive that can read CDs for the installation.

The other option is to clone the old drive to the new using something like
Acronis True Image, Norton Ghost or BootItNG.