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Installing Windows XP on laptop

Apocalypse23

Apocalypse23

Golden Member
Hi, my friend bought a sony vaio picturebook (second hand) but it doesn't have an operating system on it. The laptop is tiny as hell and has no cd rom drive or floppy at all. Is there any way to install windows on this? Would a USB CD Rom drive be bootable?

Thanks for the help
 
If you go into the BIOS it should show up in the boot order if it's bootable by USB.

F2 or Del key when it boots if it doesnt say right on the screen how to get in.
 
Maybe a possibility (never tried myself though) is to use a 2.5 to 3.5 inch hard disk adapter, create a partition on this laptop drive big enough to hold the contents of an xp cd, hook up the drive as a slave to another comp and copy the xp contents onto that drive, reconnect 2.5 incher back to the laptop and install. I'm not quite certain though, if the computer will boot from this partition automatically and allow you to install. Maybe someone with more experience can advise. Maybe you don't even need to partition, just copy the xp contents onto the c: drive and delete the install files after installing
 
Find a buddy with a 1GB thumb drive. Put the i386 directory on there, boot from it and install XP.

Put PE boot software on a thumb drive, could be quite small actually. Boot from that and hope the NIC drivers are on it natively. For this I'd probably recommend Bart's PE software.

USB CDROM as mentioned.


The laptop will be USB bootable. Virtually has to be with no FDD or CDROM integrated.
 
I had a similar problem....here's how I did it without a floppy, without a cd drive, no usb, etc.

Installed the laptop drive in a regular computer using an adaptor.

Formatted it fat32, installed win98 DOS, made it bootable.

Copied the win 98 cd and the xp cd to the drive.

Put the laptop drive back in the laptop.....booted to DOS.

You can then install W98.

After W98 was installed, I did an upgrade to XP. Still working ok......
 
Thanks for all the responses guys, appreciate it. I messed around in the BIOS and to my suprise, managed to ressurect an old (allegedly corrupted) version of WindowsXP. (Friend told me previous owner tried installing winxp and it messed up). So for me, thats a good thing. But I still want to do a reinstall of winxp using my friend's CD since this one is registered in the previous owner's name, plus im encountering some errors and slow downs.

My question is, if I pop in a winxp cd on to the HP USB DVD writer I have, will it proceed with the installation since it has to reboot and boot from CD anyway?[I think] (I couldn't get the boot from cd thing working, I think it only works with the official Sony vaio USB cd rom that is supposed to come with it, but i'll poke around a lil more) I'm just a lil unafraid to try it out.

Thanks!
 
Since you have resurrected an old version of xp, you should be able to connect to a lan and copy the i386 directory from your cd on a network and do a complete install from that. It is easier to get your specific drivers this way too. You will have to activate using the oem xp no's on the laptop sticker.
 
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