[RESOLVED] creating a usb boot disk that doesn't think its a hard drive

problem: i am trying to put xp on a netbook. I make bootable usb and format and create partition, but it won't let me make an active partition in fdisk because i booted from a different drive. Any advice?

Maybe the link in the first post here will help?

the problem was the boot sector. It tells the os what kind of device it is. I got around the problem altogether by installing vista business instead. The disk has a supported method of installing from usb. XP does not. The boot directory on the vista cd contains a tool to create a bootable sector on the usb device and launch the install program.

I havent tried these, but here's 2 articles that I found:
Installing Microsoft Windows XP from usb device (usb-stick, usb-hdd, SD card) simpler method [EeeUser Eee PC Wiki]
Make a bootable USB installer for Windows XP, Vista, 7 with WinToFlash

If you have a computer running Win7 then you can use Microsoft Store: Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool Help
to take a bootable ISO image and unpack it to a flash drive, thus turning it into a bootable flash drive with the XP installer (it works just like it's a bootable cd/dvd) on it. Which I have used to make my 8GB flash drive into a bootable Win7 x64 installer.

my alternate method involves a usb floppy drive. A dos boot disk has full access to any usb drives installed as well because the bios is still in control. My acer netbook i booted from floppy, deleted hard drive current partition, created a new one, set it active (impossible when booting from the usb flash drive), formatted it fat 32 so dos could still see it, copied the i386 folder from the usb flash drive to the hard drive, then ran the "sys" command to transfer system files to the hard drive. Rebooting with everything disconnected gave me a dos prompt. I then launched the winnt.exe file in the i386 folder (it's the dos installer) and it was easy after that.