Ok i'm not close to being any type of expert in pc...but i manage to get around and learn from friends....so here's my problem. I got a ibm thinkpad with no ultra bay for cd rom from a friend to fix....first of he didn't want 2000 and wanted XP so i thought of the best knuckle ead way to d it without reading about it was to take his hd and put it into my HP laptop and install xp using my dvd rom....so here's the problme i have and can't fix :(. When i put the hd back into the ibm thinkpad it just hangs and i can't do nuthin but watch a a blank screen...that was the only way i felt i could do the easiest install but now i suffer from a none working OS.....what can i d to fix that?

Give it one more go: 1. Yank the HDD from the laptop and install it onto your computer. 2. Format the hard drive. It would be best to go into Administrative Tools/Disk Management and remove all the partitions first, create a new partition, and quick-format it with FAT32. Do NOT format with NTFS. 3. Coppy the i386 folder from your XP CD to the newly-formatted hard drive. 4. Shut down the computer and put the hard drive back in the laptop. 5. Download a good bootdisk . . . here's my current fav: http://www.mirrors.org/archived_software/www.bootdisk.com/xpfiles/xpboot.exe 6. Boot the laptop using the bootdisk. Type FDISK at the dos prompt and hit enter. 7. Set the hard drive's only partition active. This should be option #2 on the FDISK menu. Reboot the laptop. 8. When you're at the DOS prompt, type C:\I386\WINNT.exe. This will start WinXP setup. Install XP normally. The bootdisk I referred you to loads smartdrv automatically to speed things up. Since the laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM, this was the easiest way I could think of to get XP installed on it.

The other way to put the I386 folder or directory onto the IBM is to use a Laplink type of program, with a XP-Laplink cable. This cable could be serial, or parallel. If the IBM can be networked, then network the files over, before updating to XP. There is no need to format the HDD, nor remove the older operating system, since XP can work with this.