ok this is really bugging me now. ive been working at this for the last...6 hours. i have a laptop here (dell latitude c600) and it has a floppy drive but no cdrom. so i have a usb cdrom case thing that you can put IDE drives in. it wirks fine when windows is installed but somehow something got wiped from the laptop and to make a long story short it was formated to fat32 using a win 98 bootdisk. i can use the xp bootdisks to do the beginning of the install of xp but when it gets to the part where it wants to format the drives it says there is no cd rom installed. i tried what it said in this post but it still says there is no cdrom. i also tried to do a RIS with my server 2003 comp but when i boot the laptop with the ris disk the dhcp thing times out. anyone that can give me any clues as to what to do to get xp on the laptop will be greatly appreciated. i have RIS all setup on my server and the image is already on it and it says that dhcp is working properly. i am willing to try almost ANYTHING short of buying a cdrom for the laptop as its not mine.