Help with OS install on Presario M2000 through network adapter

Hey. My fiancee recently picked up a laptop from a guy who was very neglectful and busted his DVD-Drive APART! Good thing is, I know it's salvageable because the DVD-Drive housing is still in the laptop itself. The BIOS is locked out with some random password he doesn't care to remember. I tried googling for a default just incase it was a default, but couldn't find anything for it. I was almost going to go the way of clearing the CMOS and see if I'd be able to install with a USB external, BUT: I was looking at the boot menu (esc at splash) and one selection is 'Network Adapter' Can I get a little help as to install an OS from my main computer? Or even another route--is there any chance I can buy a HDD with XP32 PRE-INSTALLED from a reputable reseller?

The server-side is XP32 Pro SP2, if that helps at all. Thanks for any help.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Google for PXE

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Bump/New problem:

I bought a 2.5" enclosure so I could try to format it through my XP PC. But for some reason, my computer won't give it a drive letter and it doesn't show up in explorer AND Disk Management. Is there ANY program I can use to boot the now USB Hard Drive so that I can format it?

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Err. I hope when you mean enclosure, you mean external hard drive. Because they DO sell just the enclosure alone and you have to supply the hard drive itself. I hope you didn't do the latter though.

In any case, try it on another PC and see whether it can be detected at all.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

Yeah yeah, external hard drive. I pulled out the M2000's hard drive and put it in the enclosure. What I did was start it up, then disabled it through the device manager (where it freezes), turned off the enclosure, turned it back on. The hard drive is being recognized by device manager, but it's not freezing up my PC, which is good. So I was able to format it no problem. Now I have ANOTHER problem: Supposedly I'm not able to install XP on a non-internal hard drive, but some forums and sites say I can. What say ye?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Then install XP on a internal drive and later clone the drive to the external one.

Or try solving the primary problem: Erase CMOS password (either by setting jumper on board or reading out CMOS data when OS is running) and getting a new optical drive.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

^ That's what I'm trying to do, but I don't know a good and reliable cloning program out there.

FELIPE NO

dd is all you need, available on every linux live disc

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

K. I have ONE more SMALL problem, and I'll elaborate on it.

I've managed to get xp cloned onto the enclosure through Acronis True Image. I found an old 40GB IDE I had laying around with xp on it, so I gave it a shot. Turns out the target drive had to be equal or greater than the source drive for the clone to work. Booted up, installed device drivers, no problem. NOW, the problem is I think M$ Updates rendered my operating system useless. I'm thinking it has to do with the fact that the OS is cloned from a tower, and not another laptop, so when I installed updates, it rendered the OS useless. I get "OS not found" during POST. I know there's something I need to change, but not sure what.

Is there anyway I can uninstall Updates while the drive is back in the enclosure, or should I just re-ghost and start from scratch?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

You do this wrong. Just get the bootstrap data on the internal drive, then clone it to the external one. You probably have to add device drivers to the image (DON'T INSTALL THEM).

Then get the drive out of the external enclosure, put it back into the notebook and finish the installation there.

WARNING: Only do the bootstrap process in your 'secondary' system, let the real installation process continue when the drive is installed in the 'main' system.
Otherwise you only have a lot of trouble - I think you've already seen that.

most valuable device drivers: ethernet, so you can get another data onto the notebook

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Well, I figured out the problem. Seems in the BIOS the boot priority was USB device first, so it looked at my PSP hooked up, OBVIOUSLY there's no OS on the PSP, that's why I was getting that error. I had put all of the updates on my PSP (downloaded from source computer, of course). It was a long process, but it's finally done. I was just 2 seconds from saying FUCK IT and replace the CDRW/DVD-ROM. Thanks for all the help in this thread.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.