have you seen how big an optical drive is? Netbooks are small for a reason.
And you don't need to remove the hard drive, that's such a massive overkill. Just format a pen drive to install the OS from, took me less than half an hour to set it up.
Griffdawg. You have 2 options, Pen Drive (4gb+), or a USB DVD drive, either will do, and give me a shout if you want help.
Upgrade to Windows 7 aswell! I did on my NC10, it's far better than XP.