Formatted Hard Drive Start Up

[kudos5]

I have a second hand Dell Latitude LS laptop.
The previous owner removed his copy of Win 2K.
I thought I could use a boot disc (I have a set of floppy discs) to reinstall my Win 2K, however, the machine has no internal drives. I have got an external floppy and an external rom - both with USB. I canmnot get the machine to recognise its USB port. The only other way in is via a network card (I have a home network running Win 2K) but it will not recognise this either.
I have tried starting in safe mode, running last known good configuration, and booting from network without any success.  
When I initialize the machine it gives me an error messaeg saying it cannot find the file for Win2K and prompting me to reinstall the programme. How can I do this ?

The eroor message displayed is:   ?windows 2000 root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe?

[Flame]

Did you set your external hard disk to be the master hard disk, or the slave? It NEEDS to be the master......

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[kudos5]

I do not know haow to set the hard disc to MASTER?
please tell me

[merlin_2]

go into the bios setup hold down the either Fn+F1 or
 F2  key
on boot and enable the usbs...did this come with usb drives..this may also help>http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4b6140f9-2d36-4977-8fa1-6f8a0f5dca8f&displaylang=en   you cant use the last good config if the other person has taken of win2k? forget the master thing enable the usb ports...

[Computer_Commando]

Read User Guide click here

BIOS Boot Screen