Booting from USB Device

[drwoo123]

I have an older Dell Inspiron 4150 Laptop. The internal CD-Rom seems to have crapped out on me. Anyone know of a way to get it to boot off of an external USB CD-Rom if I don't see an option in the bios. (or a way of reinstalling windows from files copies to hard drive)

thanks in advance

 

[TWills2]

I don't think you can do that if you dohn't have BIOS support. Try looking at dell's support site for a bios upgrade.

 

[Lord Evermore]

The BIOS must support booting from a USB device, and many older machines don't. If the device isn't detected and listed in the boot device selections, then it's not possible.

If it has a floppy drive, then you could do a several things. If you can get a boot disk that can read the USB CD drive, then you can install Windows using the installer that you load from DOS (do a search on that, I forget the command). If you can't read the USB drive at all, then you could use a floppy that loads a network drive, and have the files on another machine so you can install from that or copy the files to the hard drive. Or you could remove the drive and use an adapter to connect it via USB or a standard IDE port to another computer, and copy the CD files to the drive and then run the installer, or even run the first part of the install which requires the CD before putting it back in the laptop.

You can't reinstall Windows using just the files that are on the hard drive in a normal install.

 

[Jiggz]

You can replace the CD drive and probably even upgrade to a CDRW or DVD-R drive easier than trying to boot from a USB drive. Check Dell or your tech manual. You can even try using Toshiba's which generally fits most notebooks.

 

[corkyg]

Originally posted by: Jiggz
You can replace the CD drive and probably even upgrade to a CDRW or DVD-R drive easier than trying to boot from a USB drive. Check Dell or your tech manual. You can even try using Toshiba's which generally fits most notebooks.

Good call, Jiggz. Also, there are usually folks in most metro areas that will do the replacement for you at a reasonable cost. If the drive is modular, you can do it yourself in many cases.

 

[drwoo123]

thanks for all the replies. the only reason I am hesitant about changing the drive is that I simply use it like once a year to install windows and thats it. The laptop can boot with the Onboard NIC. It uses something called a managed PC Boot Agent which support TCP/IP - Netware, and PXE as a booting method.

Anyone ever do a windows install over a network boot - without an image of the laptop.

thanks again

 

[SGtheArtist]

I've never tried a network install of Windows, however I tried to help an forum member to install Windows XP to a USB HDD and he could install it but on once it would boot to the USB HDD when Windows XP initiallized the USB drivers it lost communication with the drive and would hang.

If you can boot into the current install of the OS you might consider resizing the Drive to create a second partition where you can copy the Windows install CD from the network & then run it from the new partition on the laptop where it could reinstall Windows on the boot partion without the need for the CD-ROM.

Note: I've never tried this and therefore I cannot verify its success.