Windows setup doesn't work with USB.

My laptop is suffering from a corrupted Windows boot sector resulting from NetBSD's installer overwriting it during its setup program. The CD drive is also acting very strange; sometimes it isn't even recognised by the BIOS during POST (it seems to not be getting power), other times it is detected by POST but kicks out during boot up (causing a 60-second poll delay), and even other times, it works for so long and then kicks out after the system is booted.

Because of this, it doesn't seem to want to boot off my Windows xp disc. I figured that since I had a new pack of floppy disks to break in, I'd download the xp setup boot floppies. I did, and used one of my few remaining Windows desktops to write them.

I booted off the 6 floppy disks using my external USB floppy disk drive by Sony, because the laptop came with no internal drive (and the external came free with the laptop's purchase). It took a long time, so I cleaned the TFT, and it looks a lot better now. Anyway, when it was done reading the final disk, it printed "Setup is starting Windows..." as is normal. However, after a short delay I was greeted with a STOP 0x0000007B error (Cannot read from boot disk). After querying Google, I found that Windows xp Setup cannot be started from Sony USB floppy drives. What luck.

It's starting to look like I'll never get that laptop working...