Except for my few tablets, I have never bought a computer that wasn't capable of running Windows XP. It's still by far the best OS ever made. The last CPU gen to fully support XP was Ivy Bridge. And ppl still sell brand new Ivy Bridge motherboards on eBay...
Anyways the gist of installing XP from the hard drive:
1. Make a DOS bootable USB drive (this is the hard part)
2. Copy Windows XP CD to a hard drive partition. (This one must be formatted to FAT32; Advanced Format [AF] drives need to be aligned first by installing Windows 7 <- this will realign the partitions as AF drives were made after XP, so it never got fully supported)
3. Boot into DOS and run WINNT.EXE from the i386 folder you copied from the XP CD.
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Additional info:
1. Use various tools to create a DOS bootable USB drive from the Windows 98SE boot disk/system files.
Win98SE boot disk images, etc can be found here:
https://winworldpc.com/product/windo...second-edition
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ve-create.html
http://www.sevenforums.com/attachmen...-win98boot.zip
Run smartdrv.exe DOS utility to increase disk transfer rate 10X before installing WinXP
Once you have the Win98 SE system/boot files, use these utilities to create a DOS bootable USB drive:
https://www.sevenforums.com/tutorial...ve-create.html
https://www.techspot.com/downloads/6...rmat-tool.html
http://download.cnet.com/HP-USB-Disk...-10974082.html
(BUT, watchout, some ppl have reported that using method 1. corrupted their flash drive)
2. Using a different method to create DOS bootable USB drive from this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt-TcCSegtU
The resources referred to in above video:
https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-m...t-usb-creator/ (Tool to create bootable USB drives)
https://www.finnix.org/Balder (DOS boot image)
3. Some ppl are reporting they needed to run NTFSDOS.EXE system driver first before running WINNT.EXE. Perhaps they forgot to format the hard drive partition where they placed/copied the WinXP CD files to FAT32????
4. If your flash drive gets messed up during any of the above steps, you could try this tool:
RecoverTool_V2.00.28_L0920
http://www.upantool.com/hfxf/xiufu/2013/3191.html
http://hulkload.com/viwd475vl5xr
http://flashdrive-repair.tumblr.com/...l-v20033-l1224
https://link-4share.com/download/_tz...l0920_rar.html