Originally Posted by toobad

I’m no expert, but I’ll try to answer your question, since there’s been no replies for over a month.

Is your external CD drive bootable? Is it the Fujitsu model FDCCD33AP by chance? That one's for the B2620/30 LifeBooks among others. Not many other CD drives are bootable in the B-series laptops, as I recall. Also, even if your drive is a bootable one, you may need to enable it and/or change the boot order in BIOS. Then, it should be just a matter of starting the laptop with the XP CD in the CD drive and following on screen instructions.

Without a bootable CD drive it will be hard to install Windows XP.

An option might be to install the hard drive on a desktop first. Then format it, partition it and install XP on it. Then lastly, install the drive in the LifeBook. This is all from memory, from when I researched this a while back. There are probably a few other minor steps involved.

This is the disadvantage of not having a built -in optical (CD/DVD) drive on the laptop. The advantage is and extremely small and light-weight unit.

Hope this helps.