Need help with OS installation on laptop. Am I doomed?

[anonymouschris]

so here is the deal. I just picked an old laptop from my dad. when booting it is "missing operating system". I only have a floppy drive for this laptop and no CD rom drive. It can boot from floppy. I'm not sure if its possible to boot for USB cd rom drive, but when I tried it did not work. So how do I install winxp on the laptop if I can't even get it to recognize my CDrom drive? Any help?

 

[AndyHui]

On another computer, create the boot floppies for WinXP. It should be 4 floppies. Boot up from those and it will load the CD ROM drivers for you to continue with the rest of the installation.

 

[DaveSimmons]

On my old thinkpad 240 with PCMCIA CD drive I had to find DOS drivers for it, then in DOS copy the CD to the D: partition I'd made on the hard drive (FDISK + FORMAT with a W98SE DOS floppy, see www.bootdisk.com for a free one). Finally, I booted from DOS and installed the OS from the files on the hard drive.

Fun

 

[imported_NoGodForMe]

You can download files from this site
www.bootdisk.com

You run the file, and it creates an image on the floppy that will start your computer, and has necessary files. You pick the version of XP you want to install, and download that file.
After you boot your floppy, you'll be in dos and the CD drive should be seen.
If needed, you can format the drive and check the partition with Fdisk.
Then you copy the I386 directory from the CD to the hard drive, and run setup from the hard drive.
To copy the files, create the I386 directory on the C drive, then type this command from the A drive
A:>XCOPY /S d:\I386\*.* c:\i386\
Be patient, this takes 10 minutes to copy. Eventually, you'll get the files over and you can run setup.