Latitude c610 Laptop OS install WITHOUT CD Drive or Floppy ?

Hello All... I hope you ahve a bit of time because this is a DELL problem, and while I do need help, I know that our lives are short so if you pass on this I DO understand.

So the very basics.

I have an older Dell Latitude c610 Laptop. The CD Rom drive is messed up and I CAN NOT afford another one. (I REFUSE to buy ANYTHING made BY DELL) And I can't afford it anyway.

I have two other machines. One Laptop and one desktop.

I can not figure out how to get a new OS on this old machine. I have two store bought legimitate copies of XP ( Home and Pro.)

So far I have :

- used a DOS Windows 98 Boot Disk to boot into DOS and check out the HD on the Latitude.

- Because of no CD-Rom I have copied the i386 directory from the OS disk to a HD on the desktop and then connected to pulled out drive from the Latitude, formated it (Fat32) the copied the i386 directory to it, as well as smartdrv.exe.

- Reinstalled the Latitude drive back on the Latitude machine.

- Used the Win98 Boot Disk to go into DOS, then to teh C: drive. Ran smartdrv.exe, then went o i386 directory and ran winnt. It went through the Xp install from the HD tot he point where I was told that the DOS part was installed and now it would reboot and contunie to install XP. When it rebooted, I got an NTLDR is missing error.

- I rebooted a few times to see what if anythgin would change, and still got it.

- I then used the working laptop's OS to copy NTLDR and NTDETECT.COM onto the Latitudes HD. (after I had to unhide them)

- I STILL got the NTLDR is missing error. I have tried four times to do this and none of them worked. Any ideas ?

Dell support is 100% no help. I can not even log onto their website or forums area because their site will not let me make up a user name. (Yes I tried other ones UNLIKE the ones I WANTED to use ! )

Thanks for even reading this,


Dan