I have an old Thinkpad X60 that I'd like to wipe clean and rebuild. Seeing as this machine doesn't have an optical drive, what's the easiest way of installing Windows XP?
I have an external USB hard drive available. Would it be possible to run the install from that instead? Otherwise, what options do I have?
Edit: assuming we're using a USB mass storage device…
Is there a BIOS setting that I would need to change, or will it configure itself automatically? Would the USB drive need to be configured in any special manner, or would simply having a copy of the Windows CD files in a directory there be sufficient?
Since the first couple answers that came in were basically "yes", I guess I didn't phrase my question correctly. I'm asking for detailed instructions on how to do this, not just a sanity check that I'm headed in the right direction. Thanks!
Best Answer
As long as the BIOS supports booting from USB, you can use an external drive. If you're got a RIS server, you could do a netowrk install, or you could get a similar image, sysprep it, ghost it across (USB boot of clonezilla, ghost from a network share), and then set it up for the new machine.
Edit:
You might need to enable booting from USB-CD in the BIOS, but you can probably just go to the boot menu (normally F12 or Escape), and select it from there. It should then boot from your Windows disk, and let you install normally.