Installing old Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini?

Hello.

I am trying to install Windows XP cleanly onto an used Dell Inspiron Mini (no idea what model it is; do not have its boxes, manuals, discs, etc.), but its installation keeps failing at cdrom0\i386\asms. The error said it cannot find it, but it is there on the CDs (tried slipstreamed SP2 and SP3, other brands, other burns from other software and drives, etc.). I have to install from an external CD/DVD drive.

I researched on Google, and it seems like this a common problem (error message) but none of their suggestions worked. One interesting suggestion was to press shift-F10 keys when the error occurs so I did that to bring up a command prompt/cmd.exe. From here, to do registry edits with regedit but regedit.exe fails to run (not installed yet I think). I also couldn't find the drive (only found the HDD). It seems like during the blue text installer, the drive exists but after rebooting to GUI installer, it forgot the external USB CD/DVD drive?

I cannot make a new partition/drive, to install from another drive on the same HDD) because the netbook only has 7 GB excluding its 100 MB system drive (Dell stuff).

I had no problems installing Windows 7 though. Any ideas? Thank you in advance. :)