I will try to be as detailed as possible, including pictures as i go.
(My laptop is a Dell Latitude CSx, but this will work for any make or model with the same issue)

*Please be...

Click here to read the entire tutorial

an outdated bios would not affect it, as it must have worked at some point in the past. It could be the motherboard itself though, but if there is no harddrive detected, your computer would not start at all.

I DIDN'T CHECK TO SEE THE DATE THIS GUIDE WAS POSTED,,,I MEAN A LAPTOP WOTH NO OPTICAL DRIVE,,,THAT WAS YEARS AGO! WELL I'M GLAD YOU DID THIS GUIDE AND THAT IT'S STILL HERE BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY THING ON THE NET THAT SOLVED MY PROBLEM! oops caps lock, sorry. My laptop does have a dvd-rw drive but it would not boot up the windows cd so I have done it this way and it worked a charm, and despite sounding complicated it is actualy very simple.

I would point out that the DOS7.1 I downloaded already had smartdrv
so there is no need to find it seperately if you use this version of dos.
Also, for anybody who didn't know,,,,if you can not format your drive in FAT32 it is because FAT32 only supports drives up to 32gb, so you must first partition your drive and format a partition smaller than 32gb in FAT32 to use this method. Like the guide says, don't worry about the other partitions as you can use partition magic to sort them out later.

Turns out my dvd-re drive is broke as XP is installed and it still wont work!

Amazing guide,,,thanks!!!!!!

@ mWMA

Magnificent work, i followed your method but with out taking tha harddisk

out(i used a usb flash drive , i will post the method later).

Imagin i was trying to make it work for several days without result, but

after following the steps here it has worked.

Thank you very much, maybe i will post my modification method in this

days.

Alan

Have you ever done this on Windows 2000 Professional? I tried it on WINXP but the laptop is extremely old and it hangs way more than the alloted 5-10 minutes. In fact i let it ride for about 2 hours. I am currently trying it on win2k but it seems to hang as well.

It loads smartdrv and then copies windows files....then it will reboot the laptop. Once it starts up it asks for DOS or windowsupgrade. I choose windows upgrade and it continues the installation...or so it seems. the first screen it comes to is "SETUP IS INSPECTING YOUR COMPUTER'S HARDWARE CONFIGURATION..." then it hangs there for eternity. I have read this post several times. What step and i missing here? What is it looking for in this step? HELP!

what type of laptop are you using? It may just take a long time...
also smartdv needs to be done manually, and only helps for the DOS section until the restart.

It is a Toshiba Portege 7020CT. I did the smartdrv manually before the winnt. That part loaded extremely fast. But after it copies the files, it requires a reboot then it will start installing windows. Once i reboot i dont go back into the DOS side but i choose the Windows Update/upgrade option. That is when the install resumes. It pops to the SETUP IS INSPECTING....... screen and then just locks. Zero HD activity at all. I did it again last night and let it run all night long. When i got back to the office this morning it is still hung on the same screen.

try starting over copying the the i386 folder, likely a bad or corrupted file causing an issue.

William Have a presario X1000 followed your guide and had a problem when it rebooted "NTLDR missing" any suggestions

Peter

When I first format the notebook HDD in the PC I choose to make the partition Active but do I make it a system partition or not, so that it is ready to have Dos 7 loaded on it.