How to install Win on PC with no diskdrive??

I have an old laptop (Toshiba) which I got from my previous work. I would like to do a cleaninstall of Win2K or WinMillenium on it. Unfortunately when I got the laptop it did not come with any disk drive. It has one built-in USB port, and it has a connection for a seperate external extension (dongle?) that houses another USB port/ethernet connection. This separate connection is connected to the laptop via a very thin parallel type plug on the side (it looks like a parallel port but is thinner I think).

I have an external DVD drive which hooks up to the Toshiba using a USB plug. I tried putting the Win disk in the external DVD and switching on the PC hoping it will look at the disk in the DVD and do a cleaninstall, but it does not seem to want to do that. A friend of mine said that would not work because the DVD is external so my laptop will not look there during bootup. Could anyone be so good as to explain to me if there is a way I can do the cleaninstall given my current hardware setup? Many many thanks

 

This is the easyest way if???
Look in the Laptop's BIOS and see if you can set Option to boot from an external drive.


It is possible another way, putting your laptop HDD drive in another PC, Loading 2000 install files on a fat 32 partiton, then put Laptop HDD back into the Laptop and then boot with windows 98 startup floppy, there is a few more details you'll need. ( you have floppy drive right?)
I personally have not done it this way but it is possible.

 

Asus,

thanks, but unfortunately I do not have a floppy drive that attaches to this laptop. Also, as far as changing the options to boot up from external drive go, there is one problem: I want to completely wipe my harddisk and do a cleaninstall of WinMillenium over the original, partly damaged (virus problem left the registry only partially functional) Win2K system, so i don't think it is possible to get the laptop to boot up from my DVD in order to install Millenium OVER the existing Win2Ksystem. In fact I tried what you suggested, and what it did was to install a 2nd version of windows (so now I have both Win 2K and Win Millenium installed, which actually defeats the purpose of what I was trying to do and uses up my entire harddrive). If you can suggest a way I can do a a cleaninstall from the external DVD I would be most grateful.

 

If you have a Win2k disk boot off that. Have install delete all partitions and format it to fat32. Then boot up the WinMe disk and install.

 

WHY in sweet jesus name would you like WinME instead of win2k?

Anyway that's your issue, now about your problem, if you hit F8 button during start-up of your laptop (not during startup of windows) you can select dos mode, insert win disk, typde d:\setup.exe and voila
(use fdisk first to destroy partitions if you like)