PC issues

“What a boring headline !”

For the technically inclined:

I’m having pc hardware issues, which is rare for me. I’m always up for a new challenge.

Situation.
I have to install XP on my newest pc.
It has 2 IDE connectors and 4 Serial ATA connectors. It must keep my IDE Raid so all IDE connectors are full. I can’t attach an IDE CD-ROM to install XP (new 64 bit edition).

I tried to copy the I386 folder on a spare Serial ATA drive and boot to DOS to run setup from that drive but you can only install it by booting from cd-rom which has its own setup launcher. There’s no winnt.exe or any DOS-mode setup launcher for me to launch manually like other versions of windows. All executables say ‘cannot be run in DOS mode’.

I also tried making a 1 gb thumb drive bootable with the files form that to emulate a cd-rom but the new pc doesn’t boot from thumb drives, maybe with a bios update but I need xp to update the bios. Another pc I have does boot from it but you can’t emulate a cd-rom on it anyway. It just acts like a bootup floppy where you can execute setup at the command prompt.

I need an adapter to convert an IDE cd-rom to attach to an empty serial ATA connector (ordered, waiting for it to arrive), a PCI interface card to give extra IDE devices, or a bootable external USB cd-rom.