That laptop is not going to be good for much without a CD rom drive anyway - why not just replace that?
With XP if you install on one computer then swap the hard drive to another you will lose the activation (too many changed hardware flags), not sure if you will be able to 'reactivate it though...'
It's a long way round, but...
1 You could install win98 ont he hard-drive using a seperate PC
2 put the hard drive back into the laptop
3 Wait for W98 to pick up the hardware
4 Set up networking & map the CD rom on your desktop
5 Start the WXP installation from the mapped CD drive
Not guaranteeing it will work, but if all else fails may be worth considering.
