Resolved Problems with Installing XP on External HD

ok, here is the situation, I recently bought a Dell Mini 10 (no DVD drive and I dont have an external DVD drive either), it has a 160gb sata drive with windows home sp3, I now bought a 500gb sata drive and also an external sata enclosure...the 500gb is in the enclosure..I am trying to install XP Pro onto the 500gb drive, then I will take the Mini apart and install the 500gb drive. I have the external drive being recognized on my HP laptop (which has a dvd drive),why cant I just run the install program on the HP and install XP onto what the HP thinks is the "G" drive?....windows says partition is not formatted, tried to quick format it, then the drive isnt recognized anymore, just one problem after another....I aint no novice here, been a system analyst for well over 20 years what I am trying to do isnt rocket science....why so many problems, the real problem is that the HP has an IDE drive in it, otherwise I would just pop the 500gb into the HP, load XP then remove the drive again, but the HP doesnt have a sata controller in it...I really dont wanna go out and buy and external dvd drive either, I installed office onto the 160gb thru my networks dvd drive and that worked, why doesnt the external 500gb work with xp, I have a feeling that its Microsh*t that doesnt want it to work....any ideas?..........Rich

 

I guess an external DVD drive is the way to, I planned on getting one later on down the line, but I guess I gotta bite the bullet and get it now, it just ***** that I gotta spend another 50-100 bucks just to load XP all because Microsh*t really doesnt want you to load onto an external drive..thanks for the reply anyway....have a good one....Rich..