no floppy drive - how do I load drivers?

Here's the situation. I have an old dell p3-800 computer that I've been using as a mp3 file server.

There's a 30 gb hard drive with windows 2000, and a maxtor ata-133 adaptor card that has two large ide drives attached to it. I mirror the large drives to external drives occasionally.

Here's the problem -- the 30 gb hard drive died. Now I have no music in my apartment. Very sad.

I'd like to do two things.
1) boot up the machine to backup the smaller of the two large ide drives
2) install fresh winxp on that smaller drive, then put the content back on it

How can I do this? I'm not sure that I can use my usb port as a boot drive. If so, that would be nice as I could use a system on a stick to do #1. If not, is there a live-cd that would work?

On #2, I need to install drivers during the boot process (LINK) and I'm not sure how to do that without a floppy drive. Is there a way that I can slipstream this into a custom windows cd? Can I somehow put it on a usb drive? Anyway, I'd appreciate the help here.

 

I'm thinking you could burn a linux distro - there are many - to a cd then use it to boot from, then copy files from your smaller drive to the larger one. There is also Bart's boot cd, which is very functional.

If you have an XP install cd that will allow you to install and activate XP to that machine, then simply boot from it and install to the desired drive. Afterwards, copy the files you want from the other drive to your XP drive. Hopefully you have a DVD read/write drive that you can boot from? This is such a necessity nowadays. The floppy drive has become all but completely extinct - read, useless

Why do the drivers have to be installed during the boot process? Why not after XP is installed? if you can do the latter, you should be able to download all the latest drivers you need from the internet, then install them. You could back them up to USB or cd, whichever you like.

 

Can any of those linux distros run _from_ the cd and allow access to usb drives?

Here's the problem. The large hard drives _only_ work when connected to that pci adapter. Windows won't doesn't see those drives and won't allow the installation without hitting F6 to load additional drivers during the installation process. It's like if you ever had a SCSI raid card or something that needed a special driver. The problem is that I don't have a floppy that I can use to load those drivers. Without being able to load or slipstream the appropriate drivers, I have no idea how to get windows onto the hard drive that's installed on the pci adaptor.

 

with nlite

I once had a hp server that needed the raid drivers (F6) and would only work with a particular model of floppy drive!..I used nlite.

 

Another alternative is to use the MassStorage DriverPack.

 

Thanks, this looks like it will do the trick for me.