Hey guys, I installed windows on the hard drive from a different system and transferred the hard drive over to the laptop because the laptop has no cd drive. Well, it doesn't load into windows at all and when I try to load into safe mode, it just stops after loading the file Mup.sys. It loads up fine on the desktop, could anyone help me please. Thanks

The reason it won't boot is that when you installed Windows it automatically detected the hardware (mother board, network card, DVD drive, etc) on the computer you were using and set up the drivers etc for that hardware. Now you have switched the drive over it doesn't recognise the new hardware. The only way around this I can think of is to get hold of a USB CD drive that you can connect to the laptop and do a repair install of XP.

The laptop I have is a really old Portege 2000 and it doesn't allow booting from a USB CD. Is there a way to load files onto the hard drive to make it boot into DOS and start the installation from there. Because I can copy files onto the hard drive, it's starting the installation that's hard as I have no means of booting because I have no USB cd or floppy. I tried making a bootable flash drive but that doesn't work either. What files would I need to have the computer automatically boot into DOS?

See if this article helps.

Install Windows XP without floppy or cd drives

thank you, i think you have just saved me. how does one go about removing dos and the dual boot screen?

To remove the dual-boot screen I think you will have to edit the boot.ini file.

How to edit the Boot.ini file in Windows XP

thank you so much for all the help. I have tried a few other computer forums and this one is the one that helped the most. I will probably post here more often. And also, how do you convert the drive from fat32 to ntfs. I always did it when installing windows but I have never done it with an OS already on it. Is it possible to do so? And are there instructions already online?

How to Convert FAT32 to NTFS