reinstall XP with broken cdrom

djastroboy · Post by **djastroboy** » Mon Aug 29, 2005 10:16 pm

I have a broken internal cd player in my Toshibal laptop and I want to wipe my harddirve and reinstall the few things I still use. I guess mostly because my computer waits about 10 minutes after Live crashes and then reboots itself.
Is it going to cost as much as I think it will to get a shop to replace my cd-rom drive?
I only have USB 1: can I get an external CD player?
Are there any other ways to install XP? Can I set up some kind of network install with my Toshiba recovery disks?

Toshiba satellite 1415-s105.

Clearscreen · Post by **Clearscreen** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 2:16 am

you can still get USB compatible USB cd Drives, but i think you might have a problem booting from it to install xp. maybe do some googling as i think you can do it, but you have to know what you're doing.
it shouldn't be that much more expensive to get the internal one replaced i reckon. they generally make them pretty easy to get at these days so it shouldn't take much in the way of labour, and if you're handy i'm sure there will be something on the web explaining how to do it yourself.

i have heard of people setting up xp installations on USB drives, but once again i have no idea how you'd go about it. best of luck with it. i know how it feels to have a misbehaving machine.

Josh-61028 · Post by **Josh-61028** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:11 am

Oh, My God!

djastroboy · Post by **djastroboy** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 11:33 am

Clearscreen wrote: it shouldn't be that much more expensive to get the internal one replaced i reckon. they generally make them pretty easy to get at these days so it shouldn't take much in the way of labour, and if you're handy i'm sure there will be something on the web explaining how to do it yourself.

I actually opened the computer up and tried getting the cd-rom out, but the connectors inside are so fragile I chickened out and just put the cover back on.
Servers and desktops I can sling together all day, but this laptop stuff has me terrified.

forge · Post by **forge** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 11:49 am

doesnt matter about booting from usb - you can just copy the CD to your hard drive then run it from there (obviously not on a partition you want to kill - but it's usually a good idea to have a partition just for windows anyway )

if you have access to a desktop PC just buy (or make) a crossover cat-5 lead and network your laptop to it and use the desktop's CD-rom to copy it accross.

Or you could buy a USB caddy to put a CD-R drive in, that way you could also stick a hard drive into it and use it as an external drive, or even take the hard drive out of your notebook to flatten/copy to it it etc etc

djastroboy · Post by **djastroboy** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 4:33 pm

Even with only having USB 1.0 I can get a generic caddy or do I have to find one that specifically says USB 1?

Clearscreen · Post by **Clearscreen** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 11:52 pm

anything USB2 has usb 1 backward compatibility built into it. i'd check to make sure when you buy it, but i'm pretty sure that was a part of the usb 2 standard.

forge · Post by **forge** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 1:27 am

you can also get PCMCIA->USB 2.0 adapters fairly cheap so you could run it full 480mbps - I have a PCMCIA ->firewire adapter and run an ext FW caddy off that but I used to have a USB2 one as well

loads of options!!