installing windows without a cd or floppy

[libs0n]

I'm installing windows on a friend's comp but have run into a snag. His computer's motherboard, an asus a8v deluxe, does not detect his lone DVD-RW drive, so I cannot put it ahead of the IDE hard drive in the boot order. I'm currently downloading the motherboard manual, and will consult to see if this can be done, any tips would be appreciated.

That brang me to the idea of installing windows from a secondary partition; I having previously split his hard drive in two beforehand. But in googling, it seems you need a floppy to get to boot to the command prompt rather than windows, and his is one of those newfangled ones without a floppy disk. Anyway around this?

Time is of the essence, any help would be much appreciated. Many thanks.

 

[kurt454]

Pop the hard drive in another PC and copy Windows XP' I386 folder to it. Get a USB thumb drive. HP has a utility that will let you make the thumb drive bootable. Boot from the thumb drive and install XP. Better use SMARTDRV as you are installing from DOS.

 

[libs0n]

Thanks kurt, but luckily the dvd drive was auto-detected the next time I entered the bios, and thus I was able to install windows. My friend is anal about his comp, and I wouldn't have been able to remove the hard drive anyways, although I had the idea to remove it, place it another comp with a cd drive, reformat and load windows setup on it, and then put it back in the original comp to install. A bootable USB drive? Now I've heard everything!