help with creating bootable dos cd with usb support for usb hd

[masterosok]

Would someone be willing to explain or point me to a guide that will show me how to create a DOS boot cd with USB support... here is the reason why I need it

I have a laptop that doesnt have a cd-rom or floppy and doesnt support booting to usb and I need to install an os on it.

I have taken the drive out and put it in a USB enclosure and connected it to another pc and formated it with one ntfs partician and one fat32 partition... the fat32 partition only have has the xp install files on it... i want to put it back in the laptop... and be able to boot to a command prompt from the drive so that I can load the install files for the fat32 partition.

From what I understand if can get the drive to work on my desktop in dos I can run the following fdisk command to set it to boot to a c: prompt

fdisk /mbr sys c:

will this work.... can anyone help me with the bootable dos disk with usb support... i have been to bootdisk.com and tried to follow their instructions but nothing has been successful... i need a little more guidance than what its provided there.

 

[bruceb]

Why not just buy a CD Drive for the laptop ? ? They are not that costly,
even for one with DVD burning and are very useful. Obviously whatever
(cheap) brand of laptop you have, they image the hard drives outside the
laptop and then just slip them in, as they all have the same hardware.

 

[masterosok]

Well the laptop doesn't boot from usb so putting from usb cdrom is out... Its not a cheap laptop by any means... its a panasonic toughbook, but it was designed to be used in the field where peripherals are unwanted or needed.... If the laptop had an option for a cd-rom I would have bought one, but thats not what I asked help for... I asked help with creating a dos boot disk with usb support.


If you have any suggestions regarding what I asked help for please by all means post but if all you have to say is that my gear is cheap... just move along... no need to waste me time reading your post.

 

[bruceb]

What you are trying to do, I do not think can be done, as you said it will not Boot
from a USB Device .. So I do not know what else to tell you. As for the product
being cheap, that was not to insult, just very odd that a laptop did not come with
or can't be fitted with a cd drive. Good luck

 

[nsafreak]

There may be another way to do what you are doing but using different tools. Let me make sure that I understand what you're trying to do here. From what I read you're basically trying to install Windows XP on this laptop and the only install medium that you have is the hard disk. There is no option to hook up either a CD-ROM or a floppy disk to this system. I'm not sure I understand why you need USB support in DOS to do this though. The best way I can think of to accomplish the goal you've set out to do is to have both partitions on the hard disk formatted as FAT32. Have the primary partition with the DOS boot files setup as small as you can make it and the same for the Windows XP partition while leaving the rest of the space available unpartitioned. Boot the hard disk on the laptop and then switch to the partition with the XP installation files (I would guess D: in this case) and run the setup. Direct it to install into the unpartitioned space and go from there. If you have the option (not sure if this particular toughbook has network connections or not) you could also do an installation via your network.

 

[masterosok]

what would be the easiest way for me to install it over my network?

 

[Aarondeep]

Maybe take out the HD and plug it into another machine, copy over the install files and set the drive bootable.

need an adapter to get the HD to work on a desktop?
Try something like this

 

[masterosok]

Someone at Hardforums informed me about the winnt32 /syspart function that you can run off the XP CD.

It allows you to load the setup files for XP to a slaved HD and make it bootable. I was able to use a USB enclosure for the laptop HD, connect it to my XP computer at home and load the install files via the command prompt. Slapped the HD back in my laptop and it booted to the XP setup like a champ.

 

[bruceb]

Now that you have it fixed, remove the hard drive and in an external enclosure
make an Image of the that drive with Ghost or TruImage to another drive. Now
if / when that laptop fails again, you just pull the drive out, restore the image to
the drive and reinstall it and you are good to go.