Thanks to Plop Boot Manager and few other freeware tools, I succeeded in installing Windows XP to an old laptop that had no USB boot support and a broken cd player, the only boot device allowed.
I described a detailed procedure in this blog:
https://gerbian.wordpress.com/You can also find it as pdf attachment below.
The advantage in this method is that Plop Boot is MBR-installed totally in an emulated environment that eventually will work on the real machine.
