Thanks very much for the astoundingly quick replies, guys.
SRX660: The laptop in question is an old Toshiba Portege 3440CT, specification here:
3440CT. The young lad who owns the laptop wants XP I’m afraid. I’ve told him his machine doesn’t really have the welly but he is insistent.
I need to boot the Windows installation from somewhere on the hard drive. Ideally I’d be able to boot from the new hard drive in the same way as from the Windows XP start-up floppy set. I have access to a more recent Toshiba laptop currently running Windows XP which I can swap drives on. So I can install a version of Windows (or Linux, if that would help) that way. But I can’t install a version of XP that will run when swapped back in to the old laptop.
TheSkeptic: There are no options in the BIOS to boot from USB and booting from the other options doesn’t find the CD drive. I think I’m caught in a Catch-22 situation here that probably can’t be resolved.
Once again, thanks very much, guys.