Question : XP install without access to CD drive

Hi Guys

Wonder if anyone's got some cute tricks that might help me out of a corner.

I need to do a reinstall on a laptop. Normally, that's fine but...

The BIOS is password protected (user doesn't know it & it's not any of the usual culprits. It's an Acer Travelmate 2300 btw) so I can't get into it to change boot order or any options relating to USB booting.

The CD drive is flakey & won't support a boot. CD is set as 2nd boot device after HD but even with a wiped HD, the CD tries, but fails to read well enough to boot.

The machine won't boot from a USB CD or FD drive.

I can put the HD into a desktop machine & do an install of XP but of course as soon as I put it back into the laptop, the hardware differences are too much to handle. Normally an overlay reinstall would sort that but in this case, there's no CD drive to do that! (The usual fail to boot in normal or safe modes).

i.e, I have a non-working install that needs an overlay but no way of administering the overlay whilst it's in the machine.

So does anyone have any ideas how I can either do an overlay install (or a 'driverless' install on a donor machine before moving the drive over) on this beast? Once it's workinjg, I can get the exact drivers over on pen drive but I need basic XP functionality first.

Thanks.

Answer : XP install without access to CD drive

For a fresh install:

Take the drive out, format it FAT32 and make it bootable using a Win98SE boot disk to transfer the system files across

Grab the Install CD for XP and copy across the contents of the i386 folder to an i386 folder on the FAT32 drive.

Put the drive back into the Acer

It should boot to the Win98 DOS prompt

Navigate to the i386 folder and run Setup