I'm out of ideas here for reinstalling windows

[EberKain]

I have a laptop, the internal optical drive died a long time ago and I have no floppy drive for it. I am reinstalling cause the hard drive wore out and I have new drive to put in. I can't boot from the external USB devices cause they are all 2.0 and my bios only supports 1.1. I tried using the Network Boot option but I couldnt' get it to work because I suck at networking stuff. I put the new hard drive into an external case and hooked it to another system, I partitioned and formatted it planning to directly install windows to the usb devce, but you cant do that apparently. So I just copied all the stuff from my xp install disc to the drive. I believe I can install xp on to the same disc that the installer is location by manually running /i386/winnt.exe. But if I move the drive onver to the laptop now its going to do nothing cause there is no OS on the HD to boot up and allow me to run the exe. What I need is something like a simple version of dos that will work on the NTFS file system and that I can install onto a usb device...I was thinking about finding a simple boot disc and copying it to the HD but I'm having no luck on making anything work. Any help, some help, will be greatly recieved.