Installing W2k on Dell Laptop w/o floppy drive

[Anonymous]

I have a dell laptop that I am trying to completely wipe out an messed up version of W2k and start with a clean install.  However The CD and Floppy drives are on the same cable.  This is the main problem... I load the four install disks then when it asks for the CD I change from the floppy to the Cd and then it won\'t recognize the Cd and I am forced to exit the setup.  Any advice?  Can I just copy the four instillation disks to a bootable cd then change the Bios first boot device to Cd then away I go?

[wdygfy]

go to the how-to\'s section of this site and read making win2k bootable you can use the same boot image for winxp which is downloadable from a link on that how-to i think or I have it let me know and I can mail it to you
anyway pretty simple procedure the hardest part being to extract the info from the original disk to the hard drive or actually there\'s really no hard part but that\'s the long part

[Teliger]

Actually, it\'s much easier than that. Set your CD-ROM drive as the first boot device in your BIOS. You should be able to boot right to the CD and it will work identical to booting from floppies... only much faster.

[tivo33]

Thanks for the help. Actually I made the w2k bootable cd and that worked great after some tinkering.  You can\'t boot fromt the original cd.  It does not work.  But after I made the boot cd i have used it many times