Hello,

When i was reinstalling windows XP on my Presario X1000, my dvd drive failed halfway and thus the installation process is stuck in the middle. Everytime I try to boot, it tries to resume the XP installation but the DVD drive doesn't work.

After about a week's worth of desperate attempts, I finally decided to use my external HDD as my primary boot disk and try to install XP on to the internal HDD once I'm on my external HDD. To use my external hard drive as my primary boot disk, I need to install some OS on my external HDD (to make it a system disk).

Initially, I was faced with a "RAW drive" problem, which I cleared by simply formatting my external HDD in NTFS. I then attached this HDD onto my friend's laptop and tried installing XP on it.

However, after copying the installation files onto the hard drive, the computer restarts (as it's supposed to) and on resuming, I face a dual boot screen with the options:

Windows XP (which is the normal boot on to his laptop HDD)
Windows XP Professional Setup

When I choose the latter, I see the Windows booting screen with the loading bar and after like 4 seconds, I get a STOP error BSOD which ends it all. I am not able to install XP into my external HDD.

I'm in dire straits, please help! :(

Configuration: Windows XP