My friend gave me a laptop and a new copy of Windows XP (I think its really an old copy, but its still packaged), and asked me to install it for him. The problem is that the laptop has neither a CD drive or a floppy drive. The bios for the laptop allows me to boot from a connected USB CD drive, and this is fine until the laptop restarts after copying al the neccessary files. It then comes up with an error which I am pretty sure relates to the fact that it can not read from the USB CD drive; i.e. it askes for a file which it can not access. Is there any way around this? Maybe I could install from another computer running XP with a lan connection? Any advice would be very welcome, this laptop is pretty useless without an OS! Thanks
Usually xp does that with bad ram, or a damaged hdd. It may be the cd you are booting from is damaged, but xp normally errors out on the "copying setup files" blue screen.. You can run killdisk on the partition you are trying to install xp to..that usually clears this kind of problem. After copying the files xp will continue to install from the hdd without any more button pressing.. you should be able to eject the cd until xp asks for it.
