The short and quick.
Got a Dell Inspiron 4000 with a modular floppy and CD-Rom drive bay. Only one or the other can be installed at a time. The HD died so I am trying to replace it with a spare HD just collecting dust. Seems easy however it looks like both the CD-Rom and floppy are DOA. I would use ta 3.5 to 2.5 adapter but stupid me fried it when one of the power wires broke and touched the other wire. The other option is a USB enclosure which I have for 2.5 dirves. I did install evrything needed to reload the OS but forgot to make the drive bootable. Flip-flopping between Win98 and XP to make it boot up 98 has somehow messed the drive up and now nothing sees it. It is going from easy to "crap can it get any worse" quickly.
What can I do now or what do you suggest.
1. Order a new 3.5 to 2.5 adapter and start from scratch.
2. Take apart my compaq laptop and plug in the HD there to load all the stuff that way.
3. Plug the HD back into the D(H)ell and somehow get it networked and format the HD and load all the files that way.
4. Boot from a floppy on my desktop and see if I can get it to reformat the USB drive from DOS (does DOS or BIOS see USB devices). This one is tricky since the enclosure requires drivers to run in all windows OSs.
5. Order a new Dell floppy drive and go that way (rather order the adapter and load the files since it's probably cheaper).
or 6. See how much more screwed up I can get it and just give back the laptop to the company.
Got a Dell Inspiron 4000 with a modular floppy and CD-Rom drive bay. Only one or the other can be installed at a time. The HD died so I am trying to replace it with a spare HD just collecting dust. Seems easy however it looks like both the CD-Rom and floppy are DOA. I would use ta 3.5 to 2.5 adapter but stupid me fried it when one of the power wires broke and touched the other wire. The other option is a USB enclosure which I have for 2.5 dirves. I did install evrything needed to reload the OS but forgot to make the drive bootable. Flip-flopping between Win98 and XP to make it boot up 98 has somehow messed the drive up and now nothing sees it. It is going from easy to "crap can it get any worse" quickly.
What can I do now or what do you suggest.
1. Order a new 3.5 to 2.5 adapter and start from scratch.
2. Take apart my compaq laptop and plug in the HD there to load all the stuff that way.
3. Plug the HD back into the D(H)ell and somehow get it networked and format the HD and load all the files that way.
4. Boot from a floppy on my desktop and see if I can get it to reformat the USB drive from DOS (does DOS or BIOS see USB devices). This one is tricky since the enclosure requires drivers to run in all windows OSs.
5. Order a new Dell floppy drive and go that way (rather order the adapter and load the files since it's probably cheaper).
or 6. See how much more screwed up I can get it and just give back the laptop to the company.
