I have a hp Compaq NC4010, I was given this computor from a friend at work. The Operating system was erased off the Hard Drive. This computor has no DVD/CD or Floppy Drive on it. I tried to take out the Hard Drive and place it in a External Hard Drive Case and install an Operating System on it as a Master Boot from my other Notebook but this did not work, I also tried to install the Operating System with an External DVD/CD Drive but the computor won't even reconise the drive, I guess cause their is no Operating System on it. How did this computor even get an Operating System installed on it with no DVD/CD or Foppy drive on it? If someone knows how to do this could you please tell me so I can find a way to do this. It's a very good computor I would love to use it. I have a brand new version of XP Home, but can't figure a way to install it on this computor. Any Help Please.

Hi Gene, and welcome to the forum.

Most likely, the computer was setup over a network, which would be logical for Compaq to do, load the images over the network and boot off a USB key...very simple to do and extremely faster compared to the alternative of isntalling windows manually on thousands of machines a year.


Have you thought about removing the cd drive from antoher computer and installing it as a temp solution to get windows and all the other software isntalled?

No place for an internal DVD/CD drive that I can see. I think the only way to hook a drive up is with a External drive through a USB port. I guess the question is How do you place an Operating System on a Computor that has a blank Hard Drive with no DVD/CD or Foppy drive?

Well, you don't need to install the cd drive properly, you can safely have the cd/dvd drive sit on the top/beside the case while you install the Operation System.

But if you cant boot off a USB CD drive, or USB floppy..then there's nothing else you can do unless you had another computer that has the same motherboard with a cd drive.

Does anyone know how to install an Operating System on a computor from another computor? Not from a DVD/CD or Floppy Drive.

Sorry Gene, you can't actually install an operating system from another computer. You need the CD to do so, and it needs to boot off the CD.