Laptop CD drive broken - can I reinstall windows?

**Over Carl** · 22nd January 2008

Yeah, realised that.

Basically with the above post of mine, problem is win 9x boot disks wont recognise my ntfs partition. Win 2k/xp boot disks will recognise it but then I can't use the driver for usb stick.

What I've ended up doing is making a win98 boot floppy with drivers for usb. Copied my xp cd onto a usb stick. Booted from boot floppy, repartitioned my hd leaving about 650mb at the end. Made that into a fat partition and copied usb stick onto it. Once that finishes will install windows from there.

Thanks a lot everyone whose chipped in ideas, will tidy this thread up tomorrow once I've finished.

**Mr.James** · 22nd January 2008

you should be able to run it direct off the usb stick... run winnt.exe from the i386 folder to kick off the installer...

**Over Carl** · 22nd January 2008

did think about that, but what happens after the reset and it carries on copying files?

Actually I'm stuck looking for a copy of xcopy that works in dos so may just give tat a shot.

**Over Carl** · 23rd January 2008

Damn, tried running it off the usb as I couldn't find a copy of xcopy for dos, takes a bloody year or two cos its on usb1.1, eventually says setup couldn't find any non removable disks with enough space despite there being a nice empty c drive. Maybe it not being formatted was an issue. Had enough for today, gonna get stoned and come back tomorrow. Hate being so close but so far

**Little John** · 23rd January 2008

bugger, I chucked my old working drive out at the weekend, and the bin men came today.

Drives are easy to fit, just open the drive (press the button) undo the screws and pull the drive out opening the drive first gives you somthing to pull on. it should just slide out, fit the new drive in to any brackets or mounting the old drive was on and put it all back in. I got one of the optaric drives from scan.

**Waka** · 23rd January 2008

Take the laptop hard drive out, buy one of these:
http://www.maplin.co.uk/module.aspx?...36945&doy=23m1

and install windows on the 2.5" drive from your desktop. If you swap the drive back at the right time it should pick up the devices from your laptop and not your desktop.

W.

**Over Carl** · 23rd January 2008

Did it in the end. When I got back in last night I formatted the c partition in dos, ran winnt, took about 1/2 hour copying from the usb stick then it looked liked it crashed but I could just about see the hd light flicker, did this for over an hour and I went to sleep. Woke up and it was at the stage it would be if it booted of the xp cd.

During the install you can convert the c drive from fat 32 to ntfs and also making that 650 mb partition was pointless as I didn't use it in the end.

Now it's just about to start installing 69 updates