Installing Windows XP on Laptop with no CDROM or Floppy

[jammyo2k]

Having a few problems with a new laptop.

I've just come into the possesion of a rather splendid little Toshiba Portege with a PIII600 processor and 192Mb RAM. The only problem that it's tiny size means a lack of CD or floppy drives and also a lack of O/S. I don't have the toshiba cd drive or the dpcking station so I've been forced to improvise.

I've been trying to get XP on the system by using a 3.5" to 2.5" IDE adapter and copying over the setup files from the Win XP CD using my desktop machine and then returing the harddrive to the laptop. Sadly I've never been able to get very far into the installation without the laptop hanging (usually just before I get the option whether or not I want to format the drive). I made the drive bootable in the first instance using my handy Win98 boot floppy to format the drive as bootable (format c: /s).

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong? Or does anyone have an alternative solution?

These are the resources I have at my disposal:

laptop
Desktop
external SCSI CDROM on PCMCIA
2.5" to 3.5" adapter

If anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful.

 

[bcastner]

Good.

I was half tempted half way through all this to put my name and address in and ask you to send the damn thing to me.

Best,
Bill Castner