# Help with installing windows via USB CDROM



## Jaeden (May 8, 2007)

Hello Everybody.
I'll get right to my problem. I came into possession of a new laptop, but it has no internal CD or Floppy drives. Although booting from a USB floppy does work, the USB cdrom isn't reconized. I've tried various boot disks that have USB cdrom support. The problem is that these drivers only work if one USB device is plugged in, otherwise there is an error.

So, its a catch 22 (no, thats not an exception error). I can't load the drivers to use a USB cdrom if I'm booting from a USB Floppy.

I've been very frustrated over this... I'm about to go to a local comp store and buy an adapter to plug the laptop's hard drive into my desktop, and install windows from there.

Thank you for any responses.


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## RevHavoc (May 8, 2007)

I've had a similar past experience before.

If the mobo doesn't recognize your external cd-rom you are pretty much out of luck going that route, at least without a considerable amount of headache. If you have another USB external cdrom I would try that as some work better than others.

I would personally get something like a laptop ide to desktop ide adapter and install Windows that way if you have it at your disposal.


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## Jaeden (May 8, 2007)

Thank you very much for your reply. And you are most definitely right. Its not possible without much headache.
Unfortunately, I did go the hard way.

For educational purposes mostly:
I used a windows 98 bootdisk, along with the usb drivers that I manually added.
Booted from the floppy drive and copied everything on the A drive to the C drive.
Switching the USB Floppy drive for the CDrom drive, and then restarting allowed me to run dos, from which the CDrom was automatically recognized.
In order to start the XP install from dos we need to go into the I386 directory and execute winnt.exe.

Here's a site if anyone is interested: http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
Method 2 most closely resembles the method I used.

Although it is recommended to copy the files to the hard drive first before installing, I decided to just install from the USB CDrom. Only a couple of "could not copy file" errors, and the XP install was up and running.

The laptop is behind me at the moment... still installing. . .
SO SLOW!!! 900 mhz :'(


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