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Laptop: no CD, no Floppy, no OS, install corrupted.. how to boot?

M

maseAT

Member
My laptop has no CD drive or floppy, and doesn't support booting to USB drives (Dell Latitude C400), and a fedora installation messed up the hard disk. So I have no way to boot to anything, except the boot option in the BIOS of network booting. I've been thinking of setting up a PXE server or whatever but I don't have a switch.. anyone have any suggestions? Know any places that fix things like this? Thanks.
 
You could always pull the harddrive out and install the OS on another computer.

I would seriously consider either getting a floppy or CD drive for that computer, or getting a new computer. I don't know how you get anything done without a CD-rom.
 
pianoman: i used to have winxp running on it, and i made a grub bootloader to install fedora locally

malak: the problem is, it's an ultraportable laptop, and it's several years old. i had a usb cd drive, but that isn't recognizable from the bios. i don't want to spend $40 for dell's proprietary cable and $200 for their proprietary cd drive, since it isn't my main computer anymore. I dont' have another laptop to put this one's drive in..

do you guys know anything about installing/booting from the network, and how difficult that is to set up? or, is there some website with it preinstalled and i can connect to it? it has 3com managed pc boot agent on it..
 
You don't need to spend that kind of money. All you need is a laptop drive-to-ide adapter. Here's one for a whopping $4.50

http://www.provantage.com/cables-go-17705~7CBTR00E.htm

Here's one on Ebay for 34 Cents!

http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-Laptop-MINI-ID...33QQcategoryZ31512QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Your laptop hard drive is secured by one screw:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/latc400/en/sm/hdd.htm#999504

So, this is a very easy fix. All you need is a couple of bucks and a little patience for delivery, and you're good to go.

Note: In case it's not apparent, the laptop-ide adapter lets you connect your 2.5" laptop hard drive to a regular pc's IDE drive cable.
 
my respect for ATers has just gone up exponentially.. slikkster, that is the perfect solution, it's simple, and it doesn't require that I buy insano parts for my outdated laptop. i'll update the thread as soon as i'm done trying it out. also, thanks for pointing out how easy it was to remove the HD, otherwise I would have continued believing that it would require the disassembly of the entire thing (and faltered at the thought of attempting it) :hooray smiley:
 
Glad to help. Please pay attention to the diagram (on the ebay link) for how to use it correctly. Should be a snap to use.
 
so anyone know if i install grub on the second (laptops) hard disk, will it erase my main desktop's boot settings? i want to make sure my desktop will still boot after i remove it..
 
One easy way to avoid that is just disconnect your main hard drive while doing this with the laptop drive, and have the laptop drive connected as master on the desktop.

This way, there will be no change whatsoever to your regular desktop hard drive. I'm assuming you have a bootable CD that you can use to add this bootloader.

Question: Are you interested in dual-booting XP and Fedora? Or are you going to wipe XP out altogether? There are many websites with details on how to dual-boot both of these OS's. It doesn't seem to be a problem, most of the time. But you should have them on different partitions.

You can easily fix your XP on the laptop by hooking up the laptop drive to the desktop pc, boot up with the Windows CD, then press "R" for recovery console. Once in Recovery Console, you would use either the "fixboot" or "fixmbr" commands at the prompt.

Here's a website that shows how to dual boot Fedora and XP, and resize the XP partition:

http://users.tkk.fi/~tkarvine/linux-windows-dual-boot-resizing-ntfs.html

You would want to resize the NTFS partition if your laptop only had one partition. Always best not to mix OS's on the same partition! If you already have two partitions on the laptop drive, disregard the resize part of the website above.

Edit: Mistakenly wrote "floppy drive" in my first couple of sentences, when I meant "laptop hard drive". I've corrected that above.
 
i was reluctant to try this because my desktop was 64-bit and my lappie 32-bit and i thought it might install incorrect packages or something, but it turned out well and everying is running smoothly. thanks for the help everyone.
 
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