Laptop trouble

[alpha1]

i have a laptop with no cd rom drive. its quite old. has win 2k. want to install xp on it any ideas how. i cant change the BIOS to boot from usb either

[alpha1]

come on guys.. there must be some one out there with an idea how to install windows xp on a win2k machine without the CD drive and a bios which wont boot from a usb device

[ThePassenger]

Attach USB CD/DVD drive to machine whilst running Windows 2000.
Insert Windows XP CD.
Select 'Upgrade' from the autorun menu. Should be a good un' as it does everything inside Win2k.

[alpha1]

still cant do it.....

right wont boot from a usb device as the bios is unable to boot from it. i need to eithr buy a pcmcia card with a pcmcia cd room drive or try and boo from a network location. i have never booted from a network loaction (althought it was on my windows XP MCP exam lol) abd dont know the syntax. can any one help me

thanks

[carfiend]

Take the HDD out and stick it in a lappy with a cdrom drive. Install XP. Copy all the drivers from the xp disk to a folder on the HDD. Stick it back in old lappy. When it boots point it at the folder on the HDD with the drivers when it asks for it.

[fredf]

I think ThePassenger was saying that you don't need to boot from the XP CD to do an install.

Boot into 2000, attach a USB CD ROM drive and run the XP setup (<CD>:setup.exe) from within 2000. It will autorun if you haven't disabled it

The setup will then (as I remember) copy all necessary files to your HD, reboot, and perform the upgrade.

If you don't have a USB CD ROM drive, you can copy the I386 directory off the CD to a memory stick using another computer and run I386/winnt32.exe

Edited by fredf on Friday 8th December 16:24

[ThePassenger]

fredf said:

I think ThePassenger was saying that you don't need to boot from the XP CD to do an install.

Bingo. Attach a USB DVD drive to the system and insert the disk. Once it's booted in to Windows 2000. Most people forget that you can, if need be, install Windows from within Windows.

Of course any laptop old enough not to have a CD-ROM (are we talking something like a Thinkpad X series here without it's docking platform?) will probably not have the horse power to run XP. Make sure you have a few GB of HDD space free for both the install set, it to uncompress AND for file manipulation during installation. Also if you have less than 256MB RAM and anything slower than a PIII-800 then I would strongly suggest you do not upgrade.

Edited by ThePassenger on Friday 8th December 20:34