my laptop has been screwed up for a while and needs to be reformatted. however the cd drive is broken. i have an external cd drive but dont know how to get the computer to boot directly from the external drive. I have looked through the F2/setup of the computer and gone to the boot from section and have tried every option. am i fucked?

4/22/2007 7:55:16 PM

try booting from usb. check the boot order in BIOS.

4/22/2007 8:23:51 PM

get a 2.5" USB hard drive enclosure, take out your laptop's harddrive, connect to a new PC, format, done. then work on getting a new optical drive.

4/22/2007 8:26:00 PM

in BIOS my "boot first device" options are:

modular bay HDD
none
reserved
miniPCI or APR NIC
CardBus NIC
Diskette Drive
Internal HDD
CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive

no boot from USB available. but the external cd drive definitely is a USB connector

4/22/2007 8:30:31 PM

oh wait, are you even trying to reinstall windwos or are you just wanting to format the drive?

4/22/2007 8:41:02 PM

really just wanting to format the drive. thought the only way to do that was to reinstall windows from boot choosing to replace everything

4/22/2007 8:45:39 PM

Quote :

"Diskette Drive "

u have a floppy drive in it?

if not pull it out, plug it into another machine and format it.

4/22/2007 9:10:19 PM

bump

4/28/2007 10:33:11 AM

Quote :

"really just wanting to format the drive. thought the only way to do that was to reinstall windows from boot choosing to replace everything"

What, exactly, are you trying to do?

Do you want to reformat a drive (not the one with your OS on it)?

Do you want to do a full re-install of Windows?

4/28/2007 10:36:48 AM

it's a laptop, it probably only has one drive (the one with the OS). You could remove it, put it in another machine and reformat and install windows, but you'll be screwed still because you'll need to run the windows repair once you put it back in your machine (which you won't be able to do because you don't have a working optical drive). I think the best/easiest thing for you to do is order a new optical drive and then install it how you normally would.

Or find someone with the exact same laptop and reformat and install windows on your drive on that one, then you put it back in you may not have to run windows repair.

4/28/2007 2:40:06 PM