Ok,

I have got a laptop and the previous owner ghosted a copy of Windows Me onto it, I want to replace it for W2K. There is no FDD, or CD, though I do have a PCMCIA cd drive, though I don't think I can boot from PCMCIA.

I also have a usb hard drive caddy, I have copied the contents of the W2K disc on to the USB drive and tried to run it as an upgrade, but it fails as it says its missing a file ( starts with - C:/upgdlls ) from the existing installation of Me, perhaps this is due to it being ghosted ?.

In the bios of the laptop I can only boot from A or C, I have read there are only two types of floppy for the laptop ( toughbook M34 ), one is usb the other is via an expansion slot - I don't have either so thats that plan scuppered

I have an 3.5" IDE to 2.5" adapter and will try the following, will it work??

Take the 2.5" drive out of the laptop and fit it my XP desktop

Format the drive - do I do this FAT or NTFS??

Copy the contents of the W2K disk to the root of the 2.5" drive.

bang the drive back in the laptop and turn it on!

Hopefully the install will start as if I were booting from CD on a normal PC.

Will this work???

Cheers,

Mike.