Installation without a CD drive

is there any utility for booting to a CD image located on the hard drive? My friend bought a refurbished laptop, and it came with a trial version of XP Home (30 Days) and no CD drive. He wants to install XP Pro to it, and I want to install Linux to it so that he can learn it. We've tried just about everything, even disassembling an external USB hard drive, and using it to connect an IDE cd drive via usb, it works from within windows, but cannot boot to it. We CAN, however boot to an external floppy drive.

Alcohol 120% or Daemon-Tools both do what you have described. I dislike both simply because they can be confusing at first and both programs (especially Alcohol) lodges itself in the registry deeply to where it's kinda hard to get rid of it fully. D-Tools is quite confusing if you are new to these types of apps. Alcohol has a nice little menu screen to do stuff and it's simple to get used to.

Alcohol

D-Tools

You could try copying the install files to a partition on the laptop harddrive and then use the external floppy to boot smartbootmanager , which in turn could boot the install partition? A bit of a stretch but this sounds like a bit of a quandry anyway. On the other end of things a cheap laptop cdrom could be gotten of eBay from as little as €10 if you look around.

we tried using SBM, and i thought of copying the installation tree to a partition, but he wants to install XP, and I couldnt get the files off the disk

i installed Daemon tools, but I dont see an option to boot to a virtual drive

Just a few stabs in the dark here- PXE boot, or maybe make a ghost image of an install, then use a ghost multicast floppy to dump the image to the disk?

Sorry, just throwing out any ideas I have left.

the laptop suports pxe, but we couldnt figure it out. if you have a link to a good quick tutorial, or feel like explaining it yourself, i'd greatly appreciate it

Damn I was hoping you wouldn't say that...I haven't a clue about PXE. However if you need a hand with the Ghost option I'm your man...

actually, the ghost option might work, what do I need to do it (in the meantime, ill research PXE)

also, he has now effectively fried his XP installation, so everything we do now needs to be able to be done outside of the OS, floppys and PXE seem like the best bet

Just use Alcohol 120%, sure it sucks but it's easy to use and you're replacing XP Home with XP Pro so if you format your drive, Alcohol will be gone - no problem there. It's when it digs into the registry is annoying but since you're getting XP Pro and erasing everything that was once there (including Alcohol) there's now no reason not to use it. Like I said: D-Tools can be highly confusing (I actually hate d-tools). I haven't any idea how you mount a virtual drive on that beast.

i couldnt figure out where the boot to iso option was, also, my friends xp installation was fried

on alcohol, where do i go to boot to an iso?