Installing an OS on a CD-less computer

[ai42]

Ok I've tried everything I can think of.

I am replacing my hard drive in my laptop with no cd drive (super slim 1 inch thick machine). I tried starting the install on a PC then moving the drive over, installing it from external device. It sometimes starts to boot, but then it hits inaccessable boot device.

Any ideas?

 

[minendo]

Use the PC to copy the entire contents of the windows cd onto the laptop hard drive. Then install the hd into the laptop and install windows from the hard drive.

 

[ttn1]

If you have anetwork, share the cdrom from your desktop to your laptop. If you don't have a network, then put the drive in your other machine and format it and make it bootable. Then copy everything from the OS cd to a folder on the drive. Then put it back in the laptop and boot up. Run the setup.exe, or whatever startup program there is, from the folder.

 

[corkyg]

Minendo's solution works - been there! There are very inexpensive adapters to allow you to put a laptop's 2.5" HDD in a desktop as an additional drive. Then simply use the desktop's CD drive and copy the CD to the 2.5" HDD. Put the 2.5 back in the laptop and install your OS from the HDD itself.

 

[tim0thy]

depending on what OS you're attempting to install mimiendo's solution might or might not work.

if it's win9x, i typically use a network boot floopy or something to get it on a network and pull over all the files in the cabs dir to a directory i created (i.e. c:\windows\options\cabs).

if you are trying to install win2k, it's going to be a bit harder. want to create a multicast server or something?