How do I do a clean Install from a USB optical drive?

[Henry17]

Trying to fix a friend's computer. She needed it yesterday but I didn't start till late and ran into a problem.

We decided to just do a clean format and re-install. Computer won't book off the Windows CD.

I booted using the 6 floppy boot disk set. Booted fine - reformatted HD - started to install windows from CD but internal optical drive still can't read half the files.

Obviously the internal optical drive is shot. I have an extra external USB DVD-burner so I gave it to her. Now I just need floppy boot disks which will allow me to install windows from a USB drive. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

[funkyworms]

Does her bios support USB booting? If not, game over, there are no floppies that will help you. If it does support USB booting, you may have some trouble booting from that DVD drive because her system probably won't recognize it.

If I were you I would look into booting XP from a USB thumb drive. (there are guides online) If you can't get that to work, boot into linux from USB thumb drive, get the external drive working, then install XP from there.

[Beavis68]

do you have another drive you can swap out the internal with?

You can get a good pioneer for $30 on Newegg.

[Henry17]

Thanks for the help. I thought about replacing the optical drive but when I opened the machine it seemed to be half the height of a normal optical drive so I gave up on that.

I did manage to get it to work.

I installed it with the bad drive pressing skip for all the files it couldn't read. It kind of installed XP but with a lot of components missing.

I then used the USB drive to copy the windows CD to the HD and did an upgrade install from the HD. It installed fine.

It seems to be working fine. Will installing it this way cause problems down the road?