I have an old laptop - an Armada E500.. the CDROM drive is not working anymore but the floppy is. I was able to format the hard drive, and I was able to copy the windows 2000 installer to it (by taking off the hard drive and installing it to a hard drive enclosure and connected it to my desktop). I was also able to run winnt.exe from the hard drive (after I installed it back to the laptop), it copied the set up files, when it rebooted (which I think should start the detection phase), nothing happened except for an underscore blinking on the upper-left corner of the screen.

What should I do now? I really want to get this thing working. Help please!

I think the install may be looking for a cd drive
try making the drive first boot

if you can make or get the fdisk utility from M$ and put the whole iso image on the hard drive (not as ISO)have a seperete folder like W_I386 with ALL the setup files in it
run fdisk look for your drive
the letter may be a diff letter under fdisk
do something like A:\cd e:\ and go through the letters
if the prompt goes there do Drive letter:\dir/p
should get the dir files and then there will be the folder you made with theinstall files on it.
and then run setup.exe

I found the setup.exe file on C:, but when I type it in, it says that it can not run in DOS mode.

Any more ideas on this? I've been searching for a solution but I can't find any. Need your help so bad!