I have an old toshiba pIII laptop with a broken cd-drive. I have been trying
to install xp on it, so what i did was remove the hard drive, hook it up to
another computer, format using fat32, and copy the i386 folder from the cd.
then i put it back into the laptop, booted using a win98 boot disk with
smartdrv added on. i ran smartdrv, then winnt.exe from the i386 folder.
installation proceeds as normal, and setup files are copied. but upon
reboot, the computer refuses to boot from the hard drive. it will only boot
from the floppy. if i boot into dos however, i can see the drive just fine.
i have tried everything including using an external usb cdrom drive with usb
drivers in dos. i also tried upgrading and downgrading the bios. i even
tried booting from the 6-disk xp boot disk set, but when installation loads,
it asks for the cd. i'm lost, PLEASE help.