Booting off of External CD-ROM drive on Dell Inspiron 2600

Merovingi

Got another tech issue (well, this one is more of an issue anyway). Wow, two in a day.. yikes.

Anyway, my Dad has this old Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop with a non-working internal Samsung CD-ROM drive, and the darn thing is in serious need of a format. I have a Sony external USB CD-ROM drive and I'm trying to boot off of that to install reformat and reinstall WinXP. When I go to boot off of the ext drive it.. well.. doesn't.

When I go into the boot priority list in the BIOS there's no option for external devices. The only options are CD-ROM Drive (for the internal drive), Hard Drive, Floppy Devices (Legacy Floppy Drives), ! Cardbus NIC, and ! Onboard NIC.

Any ideas?

saggio

Yes.

Get yourself a floppy disk, go here install that sucker on the floppy, and then boot into the Inspirion from it. You don't have to install X11 (the thing that gives you pretty GUIs and stuff) at all. All you have to do is login, and then, using the terminal, type:

$ su
# parted
(parted): print
(should list your partition table)
(parted): mkfs [number of the partition] fat32

That should wipe whatever is on the partition you choose and replace it with a new, fresh, fat32 partition.
----

Oh. I just read your post again, and you can't get your CD drive working. Damn. On that, I don't really have an idea.

Sorry.

Merovingi

saggio wrote: »

Yes.

Get yourself a floppy disk, go here install that sucker on the floppy, and then boot into the Inspirion from it. You don't have to install X11 (the thing that gives you pretty GUIs and stuff) at all. All you have to do is login, and then, using the terminal, type:

$ su
# parted
(parted): print
(should list your partition table)
(parted): mkfs [number of the partition] fat32

That should wipe whatever is on the partition you choose and replace it with a new, fresh, fat32 partition.
----

Oh. I just read your post again, and you can't get your CD drive working. Damn. On that, I don't really have an idea.

Sorry.

No worries. I did download and install that program on a floppy and wrote down your instructions because I have a feeling that it could become handy one day. So, your advice is still useful

I have found a DOS with USB support (DUSE) and I'm going to try booting that up.