For Windows 2000 you have 3 Microsoft designed options of install:
- Install from recovery partition
- Boot from the Windows 2000 CD
- Boot and install the initial OS off of the 4 floppy disks which then allowed for you to gain access to the CD ROM in which it would mount generic driver that worked with most CD-ROMs at the time.
Other ways I have seen OS's installed:
- Remove Hard Drive and place into another system of very similar hardware specs and build the system off of that and then move the drive to the laptop. If the CPU's are very similar it may work although if drastically different you end up with BSOD in a boot loop with dump messages. * This is kind of bending the EULA rules as for the minute a system is built the drive is suppose to stay with that system. We are assuming that no one would pirate the OS to use 2 copies of the same license on 2 different computers.
- Copy contents of the Windows 2000 CD to a folder on the C: drive using another computer and the drive to be for the laptop connected as an external. First you need to format the laptop drive to be bootable, and then you can attempt to install to itself from say C:\Win2000\setup.exe to C:\windows\
- Use Laplink cable with Laplink or FileVan software to transfer the contents of the Windows 2000 CD to a folder on the C: drive from another computer with a functional CD or DVD ROM over LPT1 parallel or serial port at a slow speed file transfer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LapLink_cable * Back in college we had to do this with an old Compaq to install Windows 98 to it when the CD ROM was bad. I used FileVan trial to achieve this by zipping the contents of the Windows 98 install into a single ZIP file and transfer that since the FileVan trial limited you to transferring like 10 files max per transfer session until you pay to unlock it. So I would then unzip the contents of Windows 98 and run the setup.exe and install 98 to the system from its own hard drive. It took about 10 hours to transfer the entirety of Windows 98 from CD on one system through Parallel Port to the laptop in master/slave communication mode. We set it to run at the end of the college class and came back the next day with it completed. Serial Null Cable would have transferred way faster, but we didn't have that available at the time 15 years ago.
- Drive duplicator to copy it from one same model computers hard drive to the other, and then correct the key manually so that its running off of the correct key as seen on license key label on laptop.