How to install Windows XP without using bootable flash drive or Cd Drive

[Orlando]

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Some times we come in situation where we dont have either CD drive in our system or it is it working and some times where our system wont allow us to boot from USB. If you think how it can be possible, dude, it is possible. I was in the same situation with my Dell optiplex before writing this article. My dell desktop was crashed yesterday (it is giving me BSOD every half an hour), so i tried to reinstall it with the installation disk but was unsuccessful. Though it is having a CD/DVD drive it is not working. Than i made a bootable USB drive on my laptop and tried to format the pc. After getting into BIOS i found that there is no option as well for the same. So after workaround i found this trick where i can install the system without CD drive or bootable Flash drive. I hope this will help many people with the same situation.

Pre-installation requirements:
Before we start the actuall process, there are few things you need to have. Those are as follow:

• A Xp installation CD.
• A floppy disk and a floppy drive.
• USB floppy drive will also work if you dont have floppy drive in your system. '
• smartdrv.exe file, and winnt.exe that you can download from the attachment.

Thats it. Once you are ready with all the above files, lets start the installation process.

Installing Windows Xp with Floppy Drive:

1. Insert your Installation CD in any other computer, (like i did it in my working laptop) and copy CD files on your hard drive.
   
2. Now insert or connect your USB Floppy Drive to the system. Right click and click on Format. Dont forget to select "Create an MS-DOS startup disk" from the options menu.
   
   
3. Now attached the harddrive with crashed XP using IDE/SATA to USB adapter and 2 partitions including one partition of atleast 2 GB.
   
   
4. Format the 2Gb partition into FAT32 system file.
   
   
5. Now copy SMARTDRV.EXE and winnt.exe to the connected Floppy and all Windows XP copied files to this 2GB partition.
   
   
6. Disconnect both harddrive and floppy drive from your secondary computer and attach it back to the crashed system.
   
   
7. Once it is connected, boot the pc into DOS using your floppy drive (select floppy from boot menu)
   
   
8. Run smartdrv.exe.
   
   
9. Now go to the folder named "i386 folder" and run winnt.exe.

Thats it. Windows XP installation will now start. Once it is installed, you can convert everything back to NTFS.

[Puloma]

Thanks for sharing this useful tips Orlando. usually in all new PCs we can easily boot or install operating systems with bootable flash drive using unitbootiin. But i have seen many old systems, like the one you mentioned above Optiplex, they just wont allow us to boot with usb drives. In such cases these steps will surely helpful.