booting to DOS without CD or Floppy drive

[blastman]

hey all,

I've got  a laptop that I'm trying to install XP on.

The laptop has a broken CD drive and floppy drive and I don't have a external CD drive .

I've tried booting from the 'removable media' option in my BIOS but with no success. (with xp recovery CD copied to a USB key with hidden files/folders included)

I'd like to try and make a 'to DOS' bootable USB key (if I can) so I can see if I have another option.

any ideas how???

Cheers in advance 

[patio]

Why not remove the laptop drive and use an adapter

                          that allows you to hook it up to a desktop machine.

Copy the i386 folder to another partition then replace the drive and run setup from there ? ?

[blastman]

arh, ok.

so I remove the hdd.
slave it in to another machine
format it
create two partions
copy the i386 folder to one of them

and the bit I don't get;

run the install.

How can I get to a DOS prompt on startup to start winnt.exe ??

cheers for the reply.

[patio]

Sorry...i mis-read your Post.
I didn't see the floppy was not working also.

What OS was originally on this machine ?
Is there a reason you can't replace the floppy/CD drive ?

[blastman]

i can't replace it cos my company is cheap.

I will if nothing else will do, but I'd rather get it done today then wait gods know how long trying to get hold of a drive.

turns out, the drive is only not reading cd's, so I'm currently moving the data to a bootable dvd.

fingers crossed....

[blastman]

right,

I've burnt the recovery cd to a dvd and made it bootble.

I've managed to boot to it and it's given me a command prompt at the A: drive.

A quick 'dir' shows that the A: has thing that you'd expect to see on a bootable floppy. I'm guessing that the recovery dvd has created a virtual floppy drive and loaded a dos bootable floppy disk.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.

what the *censored* do I do now???!!??

If I try to format the only drive C: it tells me 'Invaild drive, or format not supported' (format C:)

If I try to start winnt.exe it tells me it can't create a swap file.

Any ideas???

Cheers again!

[patio]

How exactly did you create the boot DVD ? ?
Whose Recovery CD is this and what ver. of XP ?

[blastman]

it's samsung's own recovery cd, I copied all the data from it and made  abootable dvd with nero 8.

not to worry, I found a brower.exe hidden in one of the folders on the dvd. it won't run from dos so i boot back to XP and it started a auto recovery suite.

NICE!!

cheers for your help guys.