I had this old laptop that survived probably 8 years or more (seems to be bought in 2000) and the DVD-ROM drive's broken. I ripped the thing apart hoping to find a loose connection but unfortunately it was a cracked PCB, so I gave up trying to repair the drive.

The laptop booted up fine, but the Windows 98 installation was goofed. It would BSOD every other minute and I was faced with the ultimate challenge - how do you install Windows (XP) without a freakin CD-ROM drive?

You'll need the help of another computer, that's for sure. Here's how.

Grab one of those $10 2.5" external USB hard drive chassis from a PC store and stick that laptop hard drive in there. If you're using a 3.5", get a standard USB to IDE converter. If you're using SATA, get the SATA one (duh).

Install VMware Server 1.0 on another PC. Get 1.0. 2.0 is a memory hog. It's free for download and use at www.vmware.com.

Grab a DOS floppy image from bootdisk.com; get the .IMG files, not the .EXE. Yes, you heard it. DOS.

Attach the USB disk to the PC where you installed VMware Server. Create a new Virtual Machine. Select "Windows 95" as the operating system. When prompted to add a disk, tell it to use an entire physical disk - and this would be your USB disk.

Go to C:\Virtual Machines\Your Virtual Machine Name\ or wherever you created the Virtual Machine.

Open up the .vmdk file using Notepad. You'll need to change the type from SCSI (lsilogic or buslogic) to IDE (ide).

Open up the .vmx file using Notepad and change scsi0:0 to ide0:0. Also change the type from SCSI (lsilogic or buslogic) to IDE (ide) if it's there.

When you plugged in your USB disk, Windows would have detected it as a drive. Go ahead and partition / format it using Windows's Disk Management tool. This is found by right-clicking on My Computer and selecting Manage.

Now, get to VMware Console and mount the DOS .IMG file you downloaded earlier and boot it.

Once DOS is up, check your hard drive and make sure you don't get the wrong disk mounted by running the command FDISK C:

Now, you'll need to install the DOS O/S into C: drive. Issue the command SYST C:. If that doesn't work, you'll need to run FORMAT C: /S. Make super sure you didn't set VMware to use the wrong disk before running this step!

Now that C: is bootable, copy HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV.EXE from A: drive to C: drive using the COPY command, e.g. COPY A:\HIMEM.SYS C:

These files are required to allow access to the high memory area (above 640kb) thus HIMEM.SYS and in turn this will allow SMARTDRV.EXE to utilize disk cache for faster disk access.

You'll also need to create a CONFIG.SYS file to instruct DOS to load the HIMEM.SYS driver. Enter the following command to do so.

TYPE DEVICE=HIMEM.SYS >C:\CONFIG.SYS

You'll also need to create an AUTOEXEC.BAT file to instruct DOS to load the SMARTDRV.EXE program on startup. Enter the following command to do so.

TYPE @SMARTDRV.EXE >C:\AUTOEXEC.BAT

Now, you may reboot the VMware machine again to ensure that it boots from C: drive fine. After that, shut it down.

Unplug and reattach the USB disk. This is to ensure you see the drive in your Windows Explorer.

Get to Windows Exporer, and copy the entire i386 folder from your Windows XP CD to the USB drive.

Once you're done, get that drive back into the old laptop/PC and boot it up.

Once you arrive at the C:\ prompt, type the following command to start the Windows XP setup process:

C:\I386\WINNT

Have fun!