Is it possible to install windows xp without optical drive, usb support?

Question

Windows

Hello dear experts! They brought me a miracle laptop compaq evo n600c. And his hdd died and bought a new one. But there is no way to install windows on it in traditional ways. The optical drive does not read discs anymore. And it also does not support installation via usb. It doesn't even have a disk drive.
There are thoughts that it may be possible to somehow preinstall Windows through another computer or create an additional partition on the hdd where there will be an image with Windows and so that Windows will be installed automatically at startup. You can put it, for example, on the second partition of the disk ... Can you advise how to get out of this situation? I understand that the laptop is not worth it and it was time to throw it away, but people really ask ...

Answer 1

Is it possible to install windows xp without optical drive, usb support?

Yes. via PXE.

Answer 2

I have a compaq evo n410c laptop, a younger model, and it supports booting from USB, another thing is that it must be enabled in the BIOS USB legasy support - Enable, while the flash drive must already be in the laptop, otherwise nothing will work, then save the changes and reboot again to set the boot priority of the flash drive, then save again and only then, again, all this time without removing the prepared bootable flash drive, start:
https://support.hp.com/id-en/document/c00055287
If for some reason this option does not work, then there is always a spare. You need to connect the hard drive to an existing PC, make it bootable, at least dos with FAT32 and drop the Windows XP distribution kit there, then manually run SETUP ... However, not all Windows XP assemblies and distributions are sharpened for a clean installation from under DOS ... Also needless to say that in this case it is worth installing without formatting the hard disk partitions from under the installer. You can even go a longer way, put a dos, from under it 98yu and roll XP on top ...

Answer 3

You can also install something like DOS on a disk on another computer and write the XP installation files to disk. Or look for a BIOS update, it may help with booting via usb.

Answer 4

On hdd, create a partition ~ 1G, then with this partition, the same manipulations as when creating a bootable USB flash drive. Those. make it active, use the standard Windows utility bootsect to fill in the boot sector, then simply copy the distribution files to the section. Download the laptop from this partition, install the system in another partition.

Answer 5

Install on another computer, write the drivers, do a sysprep, return to the laptop.