Re-install Windows Xp without a cd drive

My laptop is quite old. About a year ago i installed windows xp onto it, however now it is starting to get slow and needs a whipe. The external cd drive i had no longer works. I have tryed copying the disk to hardrive and running setup but it says "Your copy of windows is more up to date"

Is there any way to do this like running the setup from the hardrive throught a bootable floppy etc?

Please Help

 

through usb

 

Sorry forgot to mention i have tryed booting from a usb memory stick and it didn't work. I checked the boot setup and it says removable devices only include floppy

 

There sohuld be a wa via usb unless you get the 13x floppies of windows 95 and use it.

 

Any idea where i get these from?

 

Copy the i386 folder to your hard drive. Boot into the system from a dos boot disk. Change to the i386 folder and run winnt, which is the 16 bit installer.

 

So whoompus how do i get and use a dos boot disk because i tryed usign the windows 98 boot disk but when i type a drive letter like c:\ it does nothing

 

Google for boot disk with ntfs support. If you had a cd I would say search for hirens boot disk but it is cd and if you had cd access you wouldnt be in this fix. If you have external cd but just can't boot from it. Try bootdisk with duse for access to usb drive.

 

I found this program which looks promising. I'll check it out and report back

http://www.freewarefiles.com/program_9_90_11100.html