Reformating laptop
 

OK guys bit of a prob, trying to now sell old laptop, but gotta reformat it, THe prob is that the cd rom built into the laptop is busted, so i did buy a external one. Now i wanna do a format but the prob is obviously the laptop needs to no where to boot from

i looked in the bios and there is no option to boot from external cd rom

any ideas?

Re: Reformating laptop
 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994

?

Re: Reformating laptop
 

prob is its a laptop so no floopy drive either

Re: Reformating laptop
 

Change the BIOS settings to boot off a CD. Put the CD in and if it boots off it and you can load the CD then you should be able to format it and reinstall Windows without any trouble.

Re: Reformating laptop
 

that wont work off an EHDD iirc


will ask someone and reply tomorrow

Re: Reformating laptop
 

Except that no one mentioned an external hard drive, just an external cd rom. Unless you just used the wrong word, in which case this post can be safely ignored.

Re: Reformating laptop
 

Even so.


Boot off a flash memory stick? Works for me.

Re: Reformating laptop
 

if he cant boot off an external cd/dvd drive ( USB presumably ) then he wont be able to boot of a flash memory stick that also works via usb. Its probably a limitation of the motherboard/bios

Re: Reformating laptop
 

Good point. Then it can turn out to be very difficult to boot off hard drive in general.

Re: Reformating laptop
 

If someone is buying a broken laptop the odds are they only want it for parts. Just format it and leave it at that.

Are you selling it with a Windows CD and are you selling the external CD drive with the laptop?

Re: Reformating laptop
 

This is almost certainly a motherboard/bios limitation so you could try updating your bios to see if the have added low level usb support (unlikely, especially with older machines.) A workaround I can think of would be to partition your HDD (using something like Partition Magic) and then run Windows setup from the cd after reboot. Install it on the new partition and there should be nothing stopping you from wiping the old one. You could then combine the partitions again if you so chose.