help loading xp with no cdrom or floppy

I just bought a dell latitude c400 that has no cdrom or floppy and i need to reinstall windows. I took the hd out of the c400 and put it in an inspiron 100 and formatted and reistalled windows it worked perfectly fine i pulled the hd and placed it back in the c400 and i get the windows splash screeen for a second then bsod wtf!!!???!!!!????

 

That's probably because the 2 machines do not have EXACTLY the same hardware.

 

ok can u tell me if this is possible without the cdrom??

 

You can find a CDROM drive for your lappy here.

http://www.priorityelectronics.com/product/Dell/Latitude/C400/5044D/

 

When I was using Windows 2000 I used to delete all??(cant recall right now if it was all) the hardware through device manager then plug the drive into the destination computer and it worked. I did this a few times.

Do the USB if your bios supports it but if all else fails you can throw the dice and try what I did.

 

another suggestion, look for a Windows 98 boot file easy find, and it will allow you to boot to usb. xp is an easy install from a usb device and win98 supports older usb 1.0. There are a ton of ways to do this. I have done it many times on that same model using many different usb devices from cd drives to flash drives. Remember the old msdos is still a valuable tool a lot of times. A couple other things that could help you out is hiren's boot cd and SuperWinPE, and yes they can all be run from a usb device.
Hang in there and with a little patience and thinking outside the normal xp thinking you will solve this.