[jerb]

ok, every xmas vacation I get deemed "free family tech support" as so many others seem to. this means each year I get a pile of PC's and cell phones, laptops and mp3 players that supposedly "don't work". usually its a simple case od charging the phone, putting music on the mp3 player, and runing spybot S&D on the computers. this year is different, I got a laptop shipped to me from my aunt in NY which apparrently "wont turn on all the way, the screen is blue" this could have been a million and things, most of which are easy to fix however this one eludes me.

First and foremost, this is a DELL INSPIRON 1200 Laptop and is out of warrenty. when turned on I get the 'windows has encountered an error" black screen and it asks me to boot into safe mode, boot windows normally, or boot into the last known good config. regardless of which I choose the black screen is always followed by the notorious Blue Screen of Death, which in this case (my best guess) comes from a registry failure.

My first thought is to take the OEM windows disk that came with it and reinstall the OS, there is no important data on this drive. this is where the dilemma comes in... the laptop wont boot off the CD. Curious I decided to run the Diagnostics that come included (DELL Diagnostics), everything came up fine except the CD drive wont read ANY CD!

so here I am stuck with a machine that wont boot and a disfunctional cd drive. the CD drive appears to be a somewhat standard slim IDE, I have spent a little over three hours now dealing with tech support that basically told me "I cant help you, try the next guy" where I ended up at sales who supprisingly told me, "yeah, we dont sell a replacement drive for that, your $crewed. there may be unautherized third party sellers that may have the part you need... try technical support"

so, is there anyway to atleast get windows loaded? no other laptop in my house will accept the drive to see if it is in fact broken and I cant think of a way of getting windows onto the HD without a CD drive. I dont have an adapter to use the harddrive on a different machine

any idea's?

 

[falkon72]

First, do you have boot from CD as your first book device in BIOS?

Second, if you do and it still doesn't work, maybe you should try an external?

 

[jerb]

I do have it set to boot from cd


would staples carry an external drive?

 

[jlo mein]

Yes make sure in the BIOS that the CD drive is selected first as the boot device before the HDD.

Second, I guess it could mean you could have a bad CD drive. Other boot order options in the BIOS are External and Network. So I guess you could try booting off an external cd drive or HDD.

 

[jerb]

I have Bios set in the following way:

CD
USB
HDD


unfortunatly the network boot does not appear to be an option, perhaps its hidden somewhere else?

 

[ATAT]

jerb.. do you want it running windows?

Linux setup over NFS & floppy should be fairly simple
(get an external floppy drive if there isnt one on the laptop)

Oh and if you're really desparate, you can install from an external CD drive it takes about 8 floppy diskettes but you can do it..
procedure is pretty much having a old rescue diskette, boot into ramdisk, transfer all necessary utils to access an external.. boot from external. done.

Or better yet, take the HD out of THAT laptop, put it in another one, install windows there, return HD
(this would be the easiest, but you'd have configuration nightmares.. I estimate about 2-3 hours of complete driver reinstall..)

3 ways FTW!