Hi, I'm new to this forum so not sure if this is the right topic to post in. I recently bought a second hand Compaq laptop. It has no OS and no CD-ROM drive either, but it does have a floppy drive. Does anyone know how I might go about installing preferably windows XP (but any windows OS is better than none!) on it??? I also have a desktop PC so one of the possibilities i had thought of was taking the hard drive out of the laptop, putting it into the PC and copying all the necessary setup files on there. But I don't know if (a) this is possible (b) it would actually work or (c) what files i would have to copy! Can anyone help me out?! Thanks in advance, James

If you want to put the laptop hard drive in your PC, you will need a 2.5" to 3.5" converter. These shouldn't cost too much money. Or, you could try to install something like Windows 3.x or 95 floppy version. Or, you could try to install a floppy-based Linux distribution. Please post back with any further queries, James

That floppy is probably removable. You can prabably eject the floppy drive and insert a CDrom drive. Check it out and see if I am correct, check around for the availability of a CDrom for that laptop. Without it the computer isn't going to be of much use to you. First search the manufacturer website and download the manual for your model. This will tell you if the computer had a CDrom option.

Thanks for your suggestions so far... The floppy is indeed removable. I can get a multibay CD-ROM drive for about £75 new but I don't really want to spend that much if possible... Might try second hand. I also just noticed that the laptop has an internal modem. Might there be any way of installing Windows over a network via the internal modem? Any other suggestsions welcome. Thanks, James

Moving the hard drive to a PC and using the adapter suggested in reponse #1 is an option. For a WinXP install, copy the i386 folder from the XP CD to the hard drive. Check with the XP forum on how to do an install from that folder. For a Win98 install, copy the win98 folder from a win98 CD to the hard drive. You can do the install by running setup in that folder.

Thanks again. I've done the above to try and do an XP install. I copied the i386 folder to the laptop hard drive and ran "winnt" from DOS. Setup looked to be working fine. It copied all the files to my hard drive (this took ages) and then restarted. But rather than automatically continuing with the install, all i got was a blinking cursor in the top-left of the screen... Any suggestions? Could it be that my laptop (Compaq Armada M700, PII 400MHz, 192Mb RAM) isn't XP compatible? or does anyone else have experience of this problem and know how I might be able to solve it? Thanks, James