[markkal123]

i am retiring my laptop and wanting to set it up for my daughter to use at home. i formatted the hard drive and attempted a reinstall winxp. however i now, for some unexplained reason, can't boot to the cd/dvd player. i haven't used this laptop for many months and don't know if the dvd/cd rom drive died prior to my tinkering or if something happened when i reformatted the hard drive.

additionally, the bios does not have settings for a usb boot. there is no floppy drive.

short of buying a new cd/dvd player, i thought that i might attempt to yank the hard drive and put it into another laptop; create two partitions; copy the winxp installation files to the active partition and then hopefully boot to that partion and install winxp on the second partition.

can something like this work? is that all too convoluted? is there a better alternative?

Edited by markkal123, 07 March 2008 - 08:07 PM.

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Have you gone into BIOS Setup and verified the CD drive is first in the boot order? What is the make and model of the laptop? Perhaps you have to press a Fn key at boot time to get to the Boot selection menu? F10, F11 or F12 are typically used for this.

Without something bootable, there is no way for you to get to the point where you can run the install from the hard drive.

[Ztruker]

Have you gone into BIOS Setup and verified the CD drive is first in the boot order? What is the make and model of the laptop? Perhaps you have to press a Fn key at boot time to get to the Boot selection menu? F10, F11 or F12 are typically used for this.

Without something bootable, there is no way for you to get to the point where you can run the install from the hard drive.

[markkal123]

Have you gone into BIOS Setup and verified the CD drive is first in the boot order? yes

What is the make and model of the laptop? toshiba satellite

Perhaps you have to press a Fn key at boot time to get to the Boot selection menu? F10, F11 or F12 are typically used for this. i tried them alll.

[Ztruker]

toshiba satellite ????? need the model number, there are lots of satellites.

[markkal123]

thanks for your help. the model number is:
1115-S103

[Ztruker]

I found the Users Manual here: http://www.csd.toshi...u...p;x=39&y=11
but it didn't have any information for the problem you are having.

Try booting the restore CD in another computer to see if it's good or not. If yes then that pretty much pins the problem to the CD/DVD drive itself.

As I said before, you need to be able to boot something. Perhaps you could do as you mentioned and copy the CD to your hard drive while it's mounted in another computer, then install DOS to it. That would give you a bootable hard drive.

Easiest fix it to get a working CD/DVD drive.