Format & reinstall without a CD drive

Greven · 15-10-2007, 08:35 PM

Someone wants me to format the hard drive on their laptop & reinstall windows XP, but their CD drive is stuffed. It is an old laptop that probably won't boot from USB & I don't have a USB CD drive anyway.

Any ideas?

Pourhommenz · 15-10-2007, 08:45 PM

Remove the hard drive and turn it into a external drive and ghost it???

Speedy Gonzales · 15-10-2007, 08:47 PM

Hmm. whats the brand/model??

You could most probably connect it to a working system, with an adaptor.

And format it.

You could most probably install XP this way as well.

The tricky bit would be later. It may, or will crash.

wainuitech · 15-10-2007, 08:56 PM

Amazing what you can find if you goooooooogle eh! Exact instructions, pictures and all . Heres How Hopefully

Side Note:
Any one else notice that add to click on if over 18 in a lot of help sites

Cho · 15-10-2007, 08:57 PM

yeah. will probably crash if installed on a system then moved to a new set of hardware.

can ya take out the cd drive, and get an adapter for a larger drive? might fix it. although not sure if its possible.

drcspy · 16-10-2007, 02:24 AM

pull the drive out .......slave it to another system ....format it and partition it into two fat32 partitions........copy the winxp install cd onto one partition........and while you are formatting the first partition use dos and format do this: format c: /s that'll enable it to be bootable.....once you have done that put it back into the laptop....then start machine up , you'll end up with a c: prompt......then change to d: (where you have the xp insatll copied) then type in

dir and then type in

cd i386 then type: winnt.exe to start setup

or you could follow the instructions here:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_...n_tips578.html

Greven · 16-10-2007, 07:49 AM

thanks guys. That guide looks good

Greven · 16-10-2007, 05:39 PM

I followed the guide to a degree & it worked a charm.

The laptop did have a floppy drive, so I formatted the hard drive on another computer using a usb hdd adaptor, then copied the windows setup files to it. Rather than messing around with installing DOS, I put the drive back in the laptop & used a boot disk essentials floppy to sys it.