Win XP Upgrade

[Guest]

I have a dell inspiron. I am trying to upgrade from win 98 to winxp. My CD
ROM does not recognize discs very well. So in order to upgrade, I hooked up a
USB External CD-RW Drive. Now, it recognizes the win xp disc, and even will
run through analyzing my laptop. However, when it comes time to restart and
continue the installation, I get the message, "Cannot find CD". So, I took
out the CD ROM, and made the external CD-RW drive the D:. But, it did the
same thing when it restarted. Is there any way to install xp with an external
CD-RW drive? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Unforunately, not as far as I know. If possible, copy the contents of the I386 folder on the CD to your hard disk. Then run the WINNT32.EXE file in that folder.

 

[TripleEight]

I have a dell inspiron. I am trying to upgrade from win 98 to winxp. My CD
ROM does not recognize discs very well. So in order to upgrade, I hooked up a
USB External CD-RW Drive. Now, it recognizes the win xp disc, and even will
run through analyzing my laptop. However, when it comes time to restart and
continue the installation, I get the message, "Cannot find CD". So, I took
out the CD ROM, and made the external CD-RW drive the D:. But, it did the
same thing when it restarted. Is there any way to install xp with an external
CD-RW drive? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Sounds like your the USB CDROM needs to be (temporarily) installed before
Windows XP could continue with the installation. Is this the Windows XP upgrade
version?