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My laptop cd-rom is no longer working and I need to format the hard drive and reload windows Xp, My laptop is Fujitsu Siemens Amilo. I purchased an 'EASY IDE' adaptor, followed the instuction to set up the adaptor, conected the laptop hard drive, it found the hard drive and assigned the drive as, E:\ drive. now this is as far as I have got because there was no instructions as to how I should reload Windows on the hard drive, having said this I do believe that I have formated the Hard Drive, but what do I do next

Mant thanks . Please if possible do not use technical terms

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You have two different problems here.

1) XP doesn't like being installed on an external USB drive.

2) You can't install Windows to a fresh drive from inside of an existing Windows install.

What you should have done is purchased an external DVD/CD drive. Then the procedure that you would follow is boot to the XP CD and follow the normal way to install Windows on an internal drive.

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@MarkM: A good suggestion. However, depending on how old this "Fujitsu Siemens Amilo" laptop is, the BIOS on it may not allow booting from a USB attached optical drive. Hard to tell without the exact series and model number information to identify which "Amilo" he has. Looking at the Fujitsu support site, there were apparently a LOT of them. ts.fujitsu.com/support/index.html – irrational John Jul 11 '10 at 17:53
Hi - Me again, I have six Xp floppy disks for loading Windows, everything goes just fine until I put the last disk, disk 6 into the floppy drive, then it freezes up the the stop error blue screen appears. The floppy version of Windows I have three sets of six disks Xp XP2 Xp1 and each set does the same at disk six – Mal Jul 12 '10 at 8:45
Hi - I'm not sure if this message was sent - My Amilo serial number is Nr YSLSQ013179 AMILO L7320GW reg No. LM13+ (8Q6800004 - I do have an external DVD/CD drive - I entered the system Bios in the boot menu I selected 'USB Storerage Disk' saved and exit the next screen appeared "Operating System not found" - rebooted and selected F12 for the Boot Menu, there was the three option (2) - IDE 0: Fujitsu MHV2060AT - (PM. (4) - CD-ROM/DVD-ROM. (5) - Boot from LAN. Now in this menu there is no USB selection – Mal Jul 12 '10 at 9:01
Hi - Just one more thing, I also have an external Hard drive if this can help in anyway Thanks – Mal Jul 12 '10 at 10:17
@Mal - it sounds like you can boot from CD via USB then. I would get a cheap USB CD/DVD drive and install Windows from that. – MDMarra Jul 12 '10 at 11:48
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