ok this may sound a weird way of doing things but i wanted to ask if this is possible. I've been trying to install windows on a machine but absolutely nothing has worked. Win 95, Win 98 and Win Xps setup cds dont seem to want to boot and no floppy boots are working... i'm pretty much assuming theres some hardware problem as connecting different cd drives or floppy drives to the motherboard has had no effect. I have a seperate machine running windows 2000... if I insert a formated NTFS disk as a slave into the win2000 machine and install windows xp onto this seperate partition from within the OS on the win2000 machine to forgo having to boot from the awkward pc, would it be possible to remove the slave afterwards and a) have it run on the other pc (albeit with the wrong drivers to start off) and b) will the win 2000 machine be ok without any adverse effects. Im assuming this is a weird way of doing things but it seems i have little choice.. would it work? win2000 is on C: and the temporary slave disk would mean installing xp on D:

The end result would be that you would have a dual boot option at start up, on the 2000 machine, to get rid of. Then when you stick the XP hard drive in the other computer you would have to boot from the cd and do a repair install for it to be able to work. You said you can't boot from the cd so you would be wasting your time.

Although you could try to take out the 2000 hard drive and put the XP hard drive in there installing XP and then transfering it to the other machine. I have never done this but I saw someone on a webpage talking about it so I copy/paste and kept the procedure. It talks about putting in a new motherboard but if you would swap them out like I describe it would be just like getting a new motherboard. The procedure would take place after you have XP installed on the 2000 machine but before you take it out to put it in its destination machine. I will now paste the instructions. Found through this board I didn't make them just copied them so I can't take credit for their success or failure. Before you swap out the current motherboard go to device manager and select the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and select your current storage controller. Right click, select update driver and select install from a list or specific location. Click don't search I will choose the driver to install and select the standard dual channel IDE controller. This will prevent the inaccessable boot device blue screen. I have done this multiple times on different platforms with no problems. Also I found that booting the first time with the new motherboard is best done in the Safe mode where XP will install the drivers it needs and at the same time you can install the new motherboard drivers from its CD. This saved me doing a repair or a reinstall of XP. My whole system came right up and worked great and very stable.