Installing recovery CDs with SSD in UltraBay drive on T40P

[llama_thumper]

Hi all,

As many of you I have installed an SSD in my ultrabay drive (on a T40P), also removing the old HDD and the CD drive (given the ultrabay replaced the latter).

For many reasons I'd like to do a fresh install of my WinXP installation from my recovery disks. Obviously, as they are on CD, this doesn't work. What are my options? The two possible solutions I have come up with are the below:

1) put the recovery CDs on the USB stick - booting from the USB even worked, until I got to just after the third screen where I was asked to answer each with 'yes' (i.e. would you like to reinstall,format, etc). The error that came up was error number 1826 saying "not enough free space". I'm hesitant to take out the SSD and manually format it, for fear of losting the working installation I have and not being able to get a working installation on to it again. I could of course do a copy image before trying to format and then see if I get passt this error.

2) take out the SSD, put in the CD drive, put in the old HDD, install onto it, then image it and put the image on the SSD and then take out the old HDD.

Does anyone have any better solutions?

[theterminator93]

I'd use an external USB CD-ROM drive or USB to SATA/IDE adapter with a spare CD-ROM drive.

[Think43p]

You could buy a cheap USB based external CD/DVD ROM drive off ebay and install XP from there.

[llama_thumper]

Thanks - in the end went for installing on old HDD and cloning image to the SSD in the ultraby, and then booting off it.