How you can install Windows XP using a USB Stick (or “A dead dvd story”)

• January 29th, 2009
• deprecated
• 1

Yesterday, I picked up the task of bringing back to life an old laptop, a HP Compaq Presario 2500 series. Unfortunately, when I tried to boot from the Windows XP disk so I could format it and then install the OS, I found out that the laptop’s DVD drive was …dead!

I didn’t had a replacement for it, so my first thought was to copy everything in a USB stick and just boot from it and complete the process. But it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be! Of course, my first attempt (just copy everything to the USB stick) was a failure (I wasn’t expecting anything more). Afterwards, when I googled the issue, I found a lot of different ways to accomplish the task. After spending some hours trying a lot of them, komku’s solution actually worked and the old laptop resurrected!