Laptop installation problem (No CD/FDD)

[[BM]Crusher]

OK Will this work?

1) Put the laptop hard drive in my desktop machine

2) Backup my boot.ini file

3) Format the Laptop drive as NTFS

4) Run XP Home setup from the CD

5) Tick the box "copy installation files to hard drive"

6) After it has copied installation files, quit setup

7) Copy the modified Boot.ini, plus the C:\$WIN_NT$.~LS and C:\$WIN_NT$.~BT folders to the laptop hard drive

8) Replace my boot.ini with the original one

9) Put the laptop drive back in the laptop and boot it up into setup

Will that work? Is there something else I have to do to the laptop hard drive to make it bootable?

Thanks...

[ravashaak]

If I told you one way or the other, I'd just be guessing. So, I really can't answer your question without attempting your method myself. However, you may have another alternative.

If your laptop's NIC and BIOS support booting from the network, you could potentially perform a network boot and then install XP from a network install point. There would be some work involved in getting everything working, of course. However, it might be a viable alternative.

Good luck!

- Ravashaak

[[BM]Crusher]

I think it does have network boot options, but how does that work?

It will look to the lan for a boot source, but how do i provide one? it would probably be a viable alternative if it was easy and i knew a bit about it already... if it's too complicated, then....

[diesel_98a]

i would actually try that but i need to get a bigger harddrive for my laptop first, but then it might not be able to run xp, might have to try win98. i don't see why it won't work as long as the connections are fine.