installing windows xp on new hdd in laptop with no disc drive

[ghetochief]

Hello everyone,

I have a laptop which a friend gave to me because the screen stopped working, so he took the hdd out and put it into an external hdd case. I want to use this laptop so i bought a new 2.5" internal hdd to put in it, as the laptop has no disc drive I was wondering how I could install windows xp onto the hdd before I put it into the laptop, anyone got any ideas?

I thought that maybe i could take the hard drive out of my current laptop and put the new hard drive into it then install windows xp onto it, then put it into the new laptop and put my old hard drive back into the original laptop, would this pose any problems or could it be risky?

Cheers and thank you in advance, Ben.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

What good will that do if the screen stopped working? :confused:

Is there an empty drive bay? Perhaps bootable to USB?

What model and brand lappy?

[ghetochief]

because i'm guessing that the video out still works and then i will be able to use a moniter :-). I dont have it with me right now so i dont know what the model is, it's HP.
i think it has a drive bay, it has no hard drive and you can easily just insert one in the side.
Would it work if i took the hdd out of my current laptop, replaced it with the new hdd and loaded windows onto the new hdd, then took it out of the laptop and put it into the HP one?

[PrntRhd]

It won't work that way since the Windows installation ties itself to the PC it is loaded onto. If you boot the HDD from a different laptop, it won't know the hardware.

[mjc]

That depends...if you copy the install files to the hard drive and then put it back into the first laptop, it should work, but you need to make it bootable and be able to access it, which may be problematic if the the laptop it is going into has hardware problems.

It also may be possible to do the copy and start the install on a working laptop and then, at the time of the first reboot, power down instead of rebooting and then make the transfer and finish the install on the 'problem' machine...for this to work, though it needs to be done on a machine that is sufficiently similar to the target machine as to make no real difference...

But before any of that...you need to make sure that you can actually use the 'broken' laptop with a monitor. Some laptops are easy to switch between using an external and using the built-in screen, others are not. It mainly depends on BIOS settings...and what they are set to as defaults, because if you can't see to change them, then it doesn't matter. So, for that we need more info on it...make/model at the very least.

[ghetochief]

hmmm, yeah sorry i dont have the model number unfortunately, i'll re post in this thread when i get home in a few weeks, thanks a lot for your help everyone, Ben.

[Paul Komski]

In the absence of a floppy or CD (see Appendix 4 (http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1711)) the best approach, in my opinion, is to first create a simple bootable DOS partition on another PC and copy all the files that you will need later on (installation files from the installation CD, drivers, smartdrv and so on). Swap back in to the original and the PC should boot to DOS OK on the different hardware. Then install WinXP using winnt.exe in the copy of the i386 folder.

The monitor may be your problem of course but if attached to an external you should normally be able to change the setting in the BIOS or by a hot key FN on the keyboard.