ameir dot net

I just spent countless hours trying to revive an old laptop with seemingly no hope left in it.  Its CD-ROM drive is bad, it doesn't support booting from USB, and it has no floppy drive.  After backing up the hard drive using a USB caddy, I tried countless ways of loading up bootdisks over PXE using MEMDISK and PXELINUX.  I got very close several times, but unfortunately both FreeDOS and MS-DOS failed me.  The closest I got was by partitioning the hard disk such that I had a 1GB FAT partition at the end with the XP installation files copied to it.  Running winnt32.exe from DOS brought me a lot of hope, but also a lot of pain, namely the error "Setup is out of memory and cannot continue."  I hacked away and the config.sys file and kept editing various bootdisks, but no luck in the end.  I tried dozens of things, but I'll skip that all and get to the good stuff:  how I got it working.