Toshiba laptop help needed

I was given a laptop by a friend who got it from a neighbor who needed it fixing and my friend couldnt fix it so he dumped it on me.

It is a Satellite P25-S5092. The hard drive died and the cd drive died. I have a replacement hard drive but not a replacement cd drive.

In a nut shell, i need to install windows onto the replacement hard drive. Ok fine not to hard...

I did not have an external hard cd drive so i tried to look up how to install xp from a usb drive. I got pretty far in turning the usb drive into a windows 98 boot disk and i had the I386 folder but when running the windows installer it would error saying it didnt detect a smart drive and i didnt feel like investigating that any further.

SO it does boot to a jump drive.

Since that failed i got a usb cd drive. Popped in the windows disk and turned on the pc. It wont post. Pull out the cd drive and it posts just fine...ok maybe it needs a bios update.

I go out and get a usb floppy drive. Download the bios update to the floppy and plug it into the laptop to boot and same thing. It wont post. It hangs on initializing the drive in the post sequence. Remove it and its fine.

I tried install the bios update to a usb flash drive but the computer didnt like that.

Thinking maybe it was a usb port power issue i plugged in a powered usb hub into the computer and plugged in the floppy drive into that and still no post.

Any suggestions?

I'm at a loss of what to do. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and major rep to all those who help.