Installing Windows on a Mac Mini (Bootcamp) with a non-working CD drive?

Question

Mac Mini

I'm trying to put Windows on an old Mac Mini with a non-working CD drive (doesn't read any discs at all, chews and spits out). There is a CD drive connected via FireWire; Mac OS X itself installs perfectly from this, but when you try to install it this way, WIndows says that it does not find a boot disk.
I tried to make a bootable USB flash drive with XP and install from it. At first, there was just a flash drive on which SLAX stood, and from which this SLAX booted perfectly, by the way. Seeing that booting from a flash drive worked, I made a bootable Windows XP flash drive and tried to install from it. There, if anyone installed, a two-part bootloader appears - first the files are copied, and then, after a reboot, the GUI is already loaded.
The first time it seemed to work out - a bootloader appeared, I selected the appropriate option, it formatted the selected partition for me, copied the files and rebooted, but after that the bootloader no longer appeared, and a message appeared that, they say, Windows cannot continue loading, because the disk not so configured.
After that, booting from a flash drive stopped working altogether - on any reboot, it says that it cannot find the boot disk, press, say, any key.
Questions:
1. Has anyone installed Windows on a Mac (via Bootcamp) from a USB drive? Since FireWire doesn't work, what if USB doesn't work either?
2. Is it possible to somehow get into the boot process and explicitly specify where to boot from and see what does not come out? Now all I can do is run the Bootcamp installer, it reboots the computer and tries to boot from I don’t know where. To get back, I reset the PRAM, and I can try to press Option to choose where to boot from, but it only shows one partition with Mac OS on the screw. (I showed Windows once, after the first half-successful attempt to install from a USB flash drive, but I erased it all to start over, and now I can’t repeat it).
Mac is quite old (Early 2006 or Late 2006), Firmware is latest , Mac OS X 10.5.

Answer 1

I installed it on mac mini win7 a year ago via Bootcamp (the 2011 model is no longer there), I don’t remember exactly, but it seems that Bootcamp recorded everything on a usb flash drive and there were no problems
if you install xp and you seem to have a problem that the disk is in AHCI mode, you need to add it to the installation or somehow teach winXP to work with AHCI

Answer 2

But I have a slightly different problem. When creating a Windows image, boot camp did not ask to partition the disk and allocate space for Windows / mac os, but simply said that you will install the rest of the drivers later. The choice was only to accept and click "complete installation". The image was recorded, but it is obvious that Windows did not even try to install. Has anyone encountered such arbitrariness or knows what to do? Alt on reboot does not help.

Answer 3

Everything is very simple !
You take a flash drive, you download an ISO there in a computer club, and you THROW it to a flash drive.
If something doesn’t work out, change the recording types and images one by one (If it helps), and if not even here, before purchasing a USB (CD) there are such boxes with a CD drive into which you put the disk, and then you poke it into the USB and the computer understands that this is the main drive.
And if not, then by Terminal you enter (Su root) then (Ho=enable) then (MacintoshHD=1) then (Flash drive name=2)
Thus, the system thinks that the flash drive or disk is 1 priority device, and thinks that it is boot . disk and then 100% installation is guaranteed to you!!!