This Lenovo Ideapad s10e I bought recently in Japan has XP (home edition) in Japanese. So I decided to install English version of XP professional which I have.

As the Ideapad doesn't have an optical drive, I copied the entire content of the XP installation CD into a folder then started installation from there. I started a new installation in a separate partion. It started ok then after the first reboot it showed "disk read failure" & there was no other way than to restart.

There is now two entries in the boot menu, one is the earlier Japanese XP home which boots just fine and another one is the new XP professional setup that shows "disk read failure" as soon as I select it & enter.

I don't need an external optical drive so don't intend to invest there, also not sure if the problem will not appear if ext drive is used.

Can anyone please suggest why this is happening & how can I install new OS there?

Thanks.

How did you manage to do that?

like, select everything then copy & paste. Then run setup from there.

I'm a bit confused on how you actually managed to do this, can you explain it please.

1. On another PC that has an optical drive, I inserted the XP installation CD & copied the content into a USB flash drive.

2. Inserted the flash drive in Ideapad & copied the content in hard drive of the Ideapad.

3. Now I have a folder in Ideapad HDD containing XP installation files.

You need an external cdrom drive and install XP that way.

I've installed XP in a number of PCs like this, copying entire content of the installation CD into HDD & running setup from there. So in usual case it can be done without having an external drive. I recently installed XP in my firends' Acer Aspire one and NEC LaVie Light, both are quite similar to Lenovo Ideapad. My question is why does this "disk read failure" occur in this case?