Do you have a floppy drive and is it the first boot option
Have you tried using a win98 boot floppy and use the with CDRom support to access the CDRom drive
If so change to the i386 folder and type winnt to start the process from the xp disk
http://www.bootdisk.com/ or
use a USB to IDE/SATA adaptor, take out the drive attach to a computer delete the partitions, create a fat32 partition format the drive using the /s switch and set active, copy the i386 folder to the drive, reinstall in the laptop, when you startup you will have a command prompt, change to the i386 folder and type winnt to start the process to install xp, once installed and drivers installed you can convert to NTFS if needed.
this way you dont need a CDRom drive to install xp.
Edited by peter99, 08 October 2008 - 08:18 AM.