Reformat small laptop w/o optical drive

Hey guys, I have a little problem here. I have a small IBM 240 laptop that has no optical drive. It previously had windows 2000 on it, when I then used an external USB drive to install XP. This didn't work too well as the HDD is 6 gb and I only have around 1 GB as spare. I was wondering how can I reformat this from scratch? I would want XP on it if possible, but I just can't seem to get my external drive to appear on the boot priority list to make bootable discs well... bootable.

Also, if you know anything about the laptop, the mouse thingy (not a pad but one of those small dots that are like a mini joystick) and mouse clicks stopped working at one point. Ever since i've been using an external PS/2 mouse, but I would really like to know how to fix this little problem to make the laptop more portable.

 

Looking at the drivers for mouse and trackpoint (the little nub is called an eraserhead), I see nothing for XP.
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/DSHY-42DLNW.html#mouse_trackpoint
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/s...yind=0&operatingsystemind=49979&validate=true
That's probably the point at which it stopped working, when you installed XP.

When you go into the BIOS, what are the options for boot devices?
Without an optical drive and I assume a floppy drive and now it isn't recognizing a USB drive (you didn't specify if that was an optical or a floppy drive) the only two ways I can figure out to get to the hard drive would be to network it or to remove it and attach it to another computer.
I've never done a network install so I can't provide any help.
As far as removing it and installing XP to it from another computer is that the hardware detection would be all wrong. Maybe there is a way to turn off most detection and do a plain vanilla install. Again, this is not something I have ever done so you'll have to wait for someone who knows how to do either of these installs can can walk you through the steps.

 

I am very very sorry for the late reply. An explanation is not necessary.

In my BIOS I have the following options:

=config
--Memory
---Installed memory 196608 KB
---Usable memory 195840 KB
--System Board
---BIOS Version IRET75WW (BS3Q3A91)
--Initialize (on enter it asks if i want to load default bios configuration)
--Advanced Setup
---(if you want a list I'll be glad to give you one )
=Date/Time (not gunna list this as im pretty sure not needed
=Password (see date/time)
=Startup
--Power On
---+Removable Devices
---- Legacy floppy Drives
---+Hard drive
---- IBM-DBCA-206480-(PM)
---- Bootable Add-in Cards
--BIOS Setup Prompt (F1 Key Message) [Enabled]
And at the bottom there are the restart options. This was without the external optical drive connected, but from what I remember its the same options with it in.

 

Plugging the HDD into a computer... Yea about that.

Here is the most info I can give about the harddrive. I took it out, and well theres this written on it.

(Taken from another website) ATA-4 ? Ultra DMA supported. AT Attachment Program Interface (ATAPI) standard introduced. ATAPI provides a common interface for cd-rom drives, tape backup, and other removable storage drives. Ultra DMA increased DMA transfer rate to 33.33mb/s. Version also introduced a cable with 80 conductors. ATA-4 is also refered as Ultra DMA, Ultra ATA, and Ultra ATA/33.

So the real question is... how do I connect this thing to my pc???

 

Booting from sd card. I used this guide to make the card: http://www.eeeguides.com/2007/11/installing-windows-xp-from-usb-thumb.html

I was then unable to set it as first boot priority due to it not even appearing on my boot list in the first place.I used a sandisk cruzer to read the 1gb sd card

 

bump