Laptop Help Please =)

[Liquidus]

Hi, it's great to join this forum!

I had a question regarding my new dell 300m laptop. It doesn't come wit an OS and it doesn't have a cd-rom drive because it is a very mobile unit. My question is what would be the best way to install an OS. Would buying an external CDROM drive work and connect it through USB/USB 2.0. Would that need drivers to install an OS through DOS?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Liquidus]

Also---I forgot to mention that this laptop has MSDOS and CDROM drivers installed. So would a USB external cdrom work to install an OS? Nobody knows?

 

[lhuser]

In theory, it should work as a bootable device. Go into the BIOS and setup the removable disk (Or whichcever fits) as primary boot. Put your windows XP CD and it should work.

 

[Liquidus]

Well-- I just copied my XP onto a 1GB USB drive and plugged that in. It picks up the USB drive when I check BIOS and it lights up and everything, but then it just goes to C prompt and I don't know how to initialize install. I tried booting straight from the USB device...same thing(C Prompt) Any hints? Thanks.

 

[AMD RULES1]

I'm sorry to not be able to help you, But I remember reading an article in a magazine where there is a way to somehow change the bios settings so it can boot from a usb device. And this can be done on any computer, in the article, it was done on a HP notebook. I would suggest doing some searching on Google on how to do this, but I found this from Microsoft's website so you can take a look at this and see if it will help

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/usb-boot.mspx

Good luck and I hope you can get your laptop installing XP in not time

AMD RULES

 

[AMD RULES1]

you also have to do this through the bios, not through the main OS.
You need to set the boot config to boot from USB device once you find out
how to switch the bios to be able to do this.