Showing Self Loading Image For Dell Latitude

If this has been addressed in the forums; then apologies all around. I have a Dell Latitude L400. The HDD has been low level formatted and is clean, I also know it to be fully operational, It won't boot from the USB port, so there is no hope of loading XP back onto it through a usb dvd drive. I have read that there is a docking port adapter for this thing, but the cost of finding one; well, you do the math. I have tried repeatedly to 'preload' DOS or even XP to no avail. Call it Karma or stupidity, but I simply can not find a definitive answer as to how to get anything onto the laptop drive stable enough to get Xp to load normally. Forget the preloading from another computer because all it does is 'windows' logo and then blue screen, so that's out. and no amount of bios jocky-ing is going to do it either. And just to be redundant, this isn't a netbook or current technology that recognizes booting from the usb port, so we can skip that too.