Hi all and thanks in advance for reading this thread.

I was given Dell laptop (Inspiron 5000(. Which had a corrupted XP installation on it. Would have performed a clean install however the CD drive doesn't work. (power LED/disc present showing but won't read anything - have tried removing/reinserting but nothing)
Also the laptop doesn't have a floppy drive nor does the bios support usb drives.

So thinking i was smart i took the HD out and ran a clean install on a friends Dell laptop, everything went fine until i put it back in. It wouldn't boot. I've now read in another thread on this forum that you cannot transfer HD with win 2k/xp installs on because they associate themselves with the individual motherboard etc. So now i understand why that didn't work but that doesn't help my ongoing problem.

Now without even an accessible operating system in safe mode with a command prompt I don't know how to proceed. I connected a network cable from he laptop to my desktop and selected the NIC to boot. It searched with some DHCP message and then timed out saying that there is no operating system etc. to connect to. and nothing showed up in windows on my desktop...

Is there a way from either my laptop or the desktop that I can configure a network connection and then run a xp install from my desktops CD drive to the laptop? I know the second is really possible, but obviously don't have a clue about configuring the NIC without an OS on the laptop.

So please all the advice, guides and information possible would be greatly appreciated. Or any other suggestions that I have overlooked would also be very welcome. Thanks again for your time...

...Kind regards, Mike

You would be best off replacing the CD drive.

That being said you can also do this:

1. Buy a USB case for a 3.5" disk. They cost less than $20.00.
2. Install the laptop disk in this case.
3. Connect the disk to some Win2000/XP PC.
4. Create a FAT32 partition of at least 10 GBytes on this disk,
preferably 15 GBytes.
5. Copy the whole WinXP CD to the \386 folder on this partition.
6. Put the disk back into the laptop.
7. Boot the laptop with a Win98 boot disk (www.bootdisk.com)
8. Run smartdrv.exe, then c:\i386\winnt
9. Install WinXP.
10. Later on you can convert the FAT32 partition to NTFS if you wish.

http://groups.google.com/group/micro...660977c09ca727

For less than twice the price of an once use case you can get a new CD drive.

http://www.google.com/search?lnk=st&...=1&sa=N&tab=gw

Originally Posted by jephree

You would be best off replacing the CD drive.

That being said you can also do this:



http://groups.google.com/group/micro...660977c09ca727

For less than twice the price of an once use case you can get a new CD drive.

http://www.google.com/search?lnk=st&...=1&sa=N&tab=gw

Thanks for the advice, I saw something similar somewhere else, but unlike me the guy had a floppy disc drive, which I don't have so I can't follow the instructions, Even if I tried doing the above, I will not be able to use any floppy boot disks later to access the hard drive. Also in regards to installing XP onto the laptop HD whilst connected to another computer - I thought this was a no-no as it associated itself with the motherboard of the computer during installation?...I question this because as I said originally, I already installed XP on the HD using another Dell laptop as a host, but when I transfered it back it did not boot. So are you saying that it will boot if I format is in fat32 only???...I can give that a try but will still not be able to use a floppy boot disc later..so where does that leave me?

I realize I can replace the optical drive itself to avoid all of this, but I didn't really want to spend that sort of money on this thing as it is pretty old, even if it is/was running XP. I'm not bothered about having a working CD drive anyway, as once I get XP sorted on it I will get it networked for any resources.

One last thing I asked about was whether it is possible to configure networking the laptop to my desktop outside of the windows interface. (booting from the NIC)I know doing this is may not a simple thing, so any links to a specific breakdown would be sufficient and appreciated.

Thanks again..Mike

Sorry I overlooked the floppy necessity for boot.

The jist of that process is that you copy the XP CD directly to the hard drive so you would not be installing it until the drive was back in the laptop. You are just copying the CD files to install later.

I can think of no other way at this point. You would need an Operating System on the laptop to setup any network connection.

Perhaps someone else may have an idea.

You might be able to install Windows '98 directly onto that hard drive from another computer and have some chance.

The dependency of OS to the motherboard became important with both 2K and XP.