laptop - new HD - no CD or floppy drive

Here's my predicament; I have an older laptop, an Evo 410c. This is one of
those very light, small laptops. No built-in floppy or CD drive. The hard
drive failed, and I bought a new drive. Since I don't have a CD drive to
boot from, I took a new HD, connected it to a tower PC with one of those
adapters that lets you connect a 3.5" laptop drive to the PC's IDE
connector. And loaded XP on it.

After putting the new HD in the laptop, it will not boot to Windows. The
BIOS diags recognize the drive and it passes all tests.
The message I get at bootup is: "A disk read error occurred - Press
Alt-Ctrl-Del to restart".

I suspect that the problem is; the drivers XP loaded for the PC IDE
controller don't work for the IDE controller that's in the laptop, and
therefore it doesn't see the HD.

I have been told that there is an external device - like a docking station -
that Compaq made for this, called a Mult-Bay. Trouble is, the ones that
I've found on the internet run about $110. I would really like to get this
fixed without putting 110 bucks into a 5 year old laptop.

I tried a generic, portable USB CD drive. They don't work. There's
something weird about the USB ports on this laptop, they don't get enough
power from a standard USB portable drive. The Multi-bay has another pin
that gives the laptop the necessary power.

Is there any other way to get this new HD with XP on it, to boot on the
laptop? I suspect that I'm SOL.

Thanks.


.

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