Greetings! This is stumping me. This Laptop was handed to me. Does Not Work! Huh, No Hard Drive; so, I installed one.Then, DVD/CD Drive does not "work". So, I placed "FREEDOS" onto a floppy and plugged in a USB External CD Drive. I was successful at "Copying" the WIN98 cd files to the New HD. Then "Installed" Win98, all is okay to this point. ..But, I cannot "Copy" the XP fIles to the HD (in order to Boot XP after I startup win98.)Only Partial Files Copy. The CD is not questionable /nor the External cd drive.( I have tried several), but only partial files are being copied to [C:] I thought if I could get WIn98 to "Recognize" My {wired} Network, then I could then transfer the files from a current {other} pc to the Win98 one. i seem so close,yet so far from simply getting XP Files onto this laptop's HD!? Thanks for any Help -EZ

Are you able to set the bios to boot removable media and set the external usb drive as the first boot device? Silence is golden but duct tape is silver

If the external cd-rom can be read from dos you should be able to start the xp install from dos. To start the install you will need a dos boot floppy with Smartdrv.exe (google should find you a copy) and that has been configured properly, a 98se boot disk should work fine so long as you copy Smartdrv.exe onto it. You may or may not need to setup a fat/fat32 partition prior to this. Smartdrv.exe x: cd x:\ cd x:\i386 winnt.exe Where x:\ is the cd drive Alternatively if the cd drive can be accessed from win98 navigate to x:\i386 and double click on winnt32.exe. Edit: Got side tracked if you don't want to install from cd smartdrv may help with you copying issue... Also what file system is being used? I'm pretty sure fat<32 has a limit on root entries - you could try copying to another [sub]directory.