Andrew McLaren

Hi Eric

If you want to do a clean install of Vista (not a bad idea) you'll need to
boot up from the DVD. If your internal DVD doesn't work, you'd need to get a
bootable external DVD drive (and, the BIOS on your laptop must support
booting from the external drive - not all machines do this). There's no way
to do a clean install, without booting from the DVD media.

If you want to do an in-place upgrade from XP to Vista, you can just run
"setup.exe" from the Vista installation files, which you copied to your K:
drive. If you can't access a DVD drive, this would be your only solution.

Maybe not the answer you wanted, but ... hope it helps a bit.

Andrew