Can I install Win XP onto new hard drive without Floppy Drive?

[pauley]

Hi
My friends Floppy Drive has died and we were wondering whether we can install xp without the floppy drive.
He has a brand new hard drive and we were wanting to fdisk his hard drive. Can this be done with just the cd?
Thanks everyone
Paul

 

[IamElectro]

Go into the bios and make sure the first boot device is cdrom save ans exit. Put in the XP cd and reboot the machine. Should work from there provided his m/b supports the new hd.

 

[Vich]

Go into the bios and make sure the first boot device is cdrom save ans exit. Put in the XP cd and reboot the machine. Should work from there provided his m/b supports the new hd.

What he said!!

 

[pauley]

Thanks for the replies.
We have booted from the xp cd but the new hard drive seems to have win xp on the drive. We tried to install over the current O/S but it doesn't want to know. We have tried changing paths.We also tried a a format which doesn't fix it either. Is there something we are doing wrong?

 

[elzmaddy]

Provide more information pauley. What is the error message?

 

[pauley]

This is a really weird problem. We have fdisked the drive and formatted the partition. We are now ready to install XP right. Wrong!! On his system he is getting a "ntldr is missing" upon boot and wont go any further. We looked at microsoft's help files and did everything it told us to do. Now on his system he gets this ntldr is missing. Put the very same hard drive in my machine and it goes all the way to the installing xp setup.
Is there something that is possibly wrong with his bios setup for this to happen? We can't seem to see anything obvious.
Thanks a lot.