yeah it's OUR fault you didn't burn recovery discs...

[sirwired]

unless of course one of the drivers you need is for your NIC

I laugh because... yeah. I had that one happen to me personally with my old beast of a desktop never thought about downloading the drivers for it until after i installed xp to the computer

Happened to me once... I ended up popping the lid off, getting out a magnifying glass, and punched random chip part numbers into Google until I figured out which one was the NIC.

Also fun: Discovering that XP will only let you load storage drivers via floppy disk, which kind of sucks if the machine requires SATA drivers that aren't bundled w/ XP and you don't happen to have your USB floppy drive handy. (The symptom was a BSOD during setup right at the point it passes over from the setup program to booting the kernel.) I dug up a utility online that would take in an XP disc or .iso, integrate whatever drivers you needed, and then output a new .iso.