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Laptop with broken CD-ROM needs XP installation

K

Kenny

Platinum Member
I tried searching on Google to no avail. I have a customer that has an IBM laptop (T42) and the cd drive is dead. Obviously I can't use it to install Windows from CD.

I hooked it up to a desktop, and tried installing from there, but the chipset is different and when the disk is moved to the IBM, I get a BSOD.

Is there any way to copy the setup files from the XP Home disc to the hard drive so I can run setup from there?
 
What I'd do -

1. Get an external optical drive to hook up to the laptop. (I hope Windows currently works)
2. Partition the HDD with about 2GB set aside for the installation media. (I forget if Windows inflates the files before or after the copy process)
3. Start the Windows installation, but there's an option to select for the media to be copied to the HDD.
4. The computer will want to restart and setup should start from the partition, since the external drive won't work from the DOS mode. Though some laptops support USB-based drives so you may be able to use an external CDROM to do the installation - It's dependent upon the BIOS.

I did this method back in December on an aging Dell Inspiron 8100 series. Worked like a charm!
 
What you can do, start setup w/the HD installed in the desktop, then during the first reboot (after setup "copies files") power down and put it in the laptop. Boot, and from there, setup should continue


Edit: if the HD is bootable (like to a C: prompt), you can copy the entire Windows CD to a folder (say, c:\wincd)then just go into c:\wincd\i386 and launch "winnt.exe" which is, i think, the dos-based setup routine.
 
Gonna be a little hard...Windows died on the machine and is no longer booting. I can get their old 98 setup disc to install using a different machine, but I get a BSOD of 0x000007b once I get XP on there. The MS article states that this happens when the IDE chipset is different than the machine it is booting on. Unfortunately, the thinkpad is a few years old and does not work with an external drive via bios.

I have heard of some people using some DOS programs (such as FreeDOS) to get their drives to boot to a C: prompt, and doing it from there. Worth a shot, but it sort of sucks at the moment because I don't have time to play with it; there are dozens of other machines that need service and are much less of a headache.

They need it fixed by Sunday evening and it doesn't look too good. Hopefully the DOS method works and I can finally get this computer out of my hair.

Thanks for the suggestions so far, they're worth looking into.
 
Maybe consider making a bootable USB flash disk. (hopefully this is an option)
There is even tools to make a completely bootable XP install from a flash disk. Would work great as a support tool for you in the future.
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Thanks for the tip, but it looks like I'll have to try that with another machine. This one will only boot from CD-ROM and hard disk. 🙁
 
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