Re-installing Windows on an old laptop

Posted by Khaled on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Khaled
Published on 2011-12-09T17:09:34Z Indexed on 2012/06/04 16:47 UTC
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windows-xp

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laptop

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reinstall

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old

I have an old laptop and I want to re-install Windows XP on it. The problem is that this laptop does not have an optical drive. I checked the boot sequence in the BIOS. It does not show an option to boot from USB. It have only two options:

Boot from HD.
Boot using Realtek agent (network boot).

I tried to copy the Windows CD to second drive D:\ and run the installed from there. However, I could not format the C:\ drive. Windows complaints about setup files will be removed or something like that.

I tried to boot the laptop using PXE, but I could not. It seems that the DHCP request did not get answered.

I thought I could use a USB CD-ROM drive (I don't have one to try), but it might not work as there is no option to boot from USB. Do you think it will work? Do I have other options to try? Any recommendations?

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