HowdoI install XP on floppyless/CDless notebook

Hi All

Please could one of you gurus offer some advice on how I go about installing XP on a Dell Latituide C40 notebook.

The notebook does not have a floppy, but does have a USB CDROM. The notebook does not have any bays in which to install internal floppy/CD.

The BIOS does not allow booting from USB devices thus I cannot boot from the CDROM. I cannot flash the BIOS as I do not have a floppy drive on which to install the appropriate flash image.

I think the only way round this is to get a cable and external FDD device but I have no idea on types of cables and devices to purchase, nor part numbers. A google has brought up lots of cables and USB floppys but a USB floppy will not be seen at boot time.

I should also mention that currently there is no OS installed on the notebook. "No system disc..." blah blah..

Arggh.

How on earth do I achive this??

Thanks in advance,
Daz

 

Do you have a desktop, or know someone who does?

If so you could buy a small notebook harddrive enclosure (or just get the cables instead), take the drive from the notebook and then connect the drive to the desktop. Once connected you should be able to install Windows to the notebook hard-drive.

Once installed, you can put the drive back in your notebook and everything should be fine.

 

Or hook the drive directly via an adapter. It may be possible to do it on a network, but I think you need a server, its been sooo long since I done it.

 

Thanks for the speedy response

I'm a little confused.

If the drive is removed from the notebook then and conencted to a desktop/network, then how does the install process have any idea as to the hardware .. it cannot detect it .. it is not connected to the buses.

I suppose I could "load" a disk image onto the drive but then I'd need an image of the original notebook install.

 

Is the 20GB drive in my notebook SATA or IDE ?

 

If you installed windows on the drive connected to another machine, you would need to perform a repair install when you placed it back in your notebook. IDE most likely, look up your machine on dells support page.

 

Do this. It will be tricky but it should work. XP works in 2 phases. Pre-install that sets up the partitioning and boot loader then the actual installation. Hardware detection is done during the actual installation. The pre-install is what we need to get past so the laptop will boot from the hard drive and start installation.

1. Connect the laptop drive to your desktop. It may be useful to disconnect your other hard drives to be sure it sets up the boot loader on the correct hard drive.

2. Boot from the CD and start the pre-install part. Partition the hard drive appropriately and select which partition to install to.

3. Allow it to proceed and when it gets to the screen saying "Reboot in 15 seconds..." turn off the computer. DO NOT ALLOW IT TO REBOOT.

4. Connect your USB CD-Rom drive and your hard drive to your laptop now. I assume the hard-drive goes into a bay so go ahead and re-insert it there. Now turn on the laptop and pray.

Assuming everything went well the laptop should boot from the hard drive and start to install XP on it. Also it may pick up on the USB cdrom drive for additional files. The pre-install only installs enough stuff to get the installation going from the hard drive. It still copies stuff from the cd like drivers.

If the above fails during installation (i.e. it needs to know where the install files are at and it does not see the usb cdrom drive) then try the above again but before putting the hard drive back into the laptop start up your desktop normally and copy over the contents of your CD to the laptop hard drive. By the looks of things you will need the I386, CMPNENTS, and DOTNETFX folders in order to assure a proper installation. Just copy them to a folder named "Windows Setup" or something like that. If it prompts you again just point it to the location on the hard drive where you put the files and it will get it from there. You won't even need the USB drive connected to do it this way.

 

shinji257: many thanks.

Your detailed response gave me some ideas. What I did was to copy the NTLDR BOOT.INI etc to the notebook HDD then copy the I386 folder from XP install to the HDD. Plugged in and installed from the HDD. No probs. Also now have an XP install source dir should the CDDRIVE ever go west again.

 

Wow I would have never thought about that. This is very usefull information

 

The boot loader would of still had to of been set on a mbr though so this probably won't work for a brand new laptop drive. Since yours likely had XP or 2000 on it previously it also probably had the original NTLDR boot loader. Both the windows 2000 and XP boot loaders can startup XP...

Oh and it is recommended to install the recovery console onto the hard drive so you can use it since you cannot boot from a cd.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/216417