Installing winXP w/o CDROM

[Sust]

I know linux can do a network install, but can windows XP do it?
I have this super old sharp actius(pentium 233) and the previous owner f'd up the CDROM drive that came with it.
I really wanna press this computer back into service again, but it is so bogged down in random crap that I need to wipe it just to ensure that I will never see things like bonzi buddy.
Is there ANY way to install windows XP w/o the CDROM?
It has a USB port and a PCMCIA slot so I can potentially do some things, but I dont know if I can boot off of a USB device.
Any helpful ideas?

 

[lobadobadingdong]

xp will bog down that system, you'd be better off getting a copy of 95, but if you really want to do a network install you should look here....It'd be a whole lot easier to just find a used cd-rom drive for $10.

 

[Sust]

Yeh, I keep on forgetting how old this POS is
I was thinking win98SE too, but I dont think they do the network install either.

Hmm... used CDROM from egay...
Thanks for the ideas lobadobadingdong

You wouldnt happen to know of any sharp computer enthusiast sites would you?

 

[Sust]

Wait...
I think i've found the answer.

boot disk

If I use this network boot disk and go into DOS, I can then mount a shared directory.
Then, if I share the CDROM of a computer on the network, I can then just "cd" into that "folder" and just type "setup.exe"
I'm thinking that this should theoretically work... Let's see how the computer likes win2k...
w00t!

I'll write back when I try it.
HTH anyone else who has a ghetto computer with no CD-ROM drive.

 

[Sust]

Ok..
Tried the DOS network boot thing and it did not work.
However, I then slapped myself in the head for not having thought of it sooner.
Rather than go thru all of this effort in DOS, why not just do it in windows?
So I installed win2k off of a CDROM I had shared on the network and everything worked like a charm.
The only hang up I could see was that I was not able to delete the partition with the win2k install.
Plus, I was FORCED to convert the FAT32 to NTFS (I wanted to just delete the partition outright).
Kinda fishy to me... but everything is okay for the most part.
After an hour of updates, the laptop runs and netsurfing is, I daresay, smooth.
Though that's about it. Dont try doing anything else with it.
After installing Mcafee 7 on it, the bootup process slowed to a crawl.
I guess that's just one of the consequences of having 64MB of RAM on a Pentium 266.