Hello You most intelligent people!

I have come across an older laptop hard drive with which XP was installed. However, when I placed the drive in the current laptop, it says to install the OS. This led me to believe that it is some how possible to download a complete Linux OS to a flash drive and then proceed to place the old HD back into the laptop. And then finally boot the laptop and install the Linux OS onto the HD from the flash drive. Is this possible without having an OS to boot from? Can I do a complete install that way? Any help is ALWAYS greatly appreciated. Thank you.

not sure what you are trying to do but i would just install from a live-usb.

As long as the laptop is able to boot from a CD/DVD or USB flash drive, there is no need for anything to pre-exist on its hard drive. Just boot from whatever media you have and let the installer take it from there.