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Ok, so I am trying to downgrade to XP, only to find out my CDROM drive has just died on me. Unfortunately it's a laptop, so no quick switchover is available.

I've tried booting from an external CDROM drive, and even though the bios detects it, I cannot boot from it.

I'm running out of options, what do people suggest?

At the moment I'm looking to see if it's possible to get the boot.ini file to point to an external drive. Any ideas?

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7 months ago by Adam L.

11 Replies

  • Konstantino K. replied Dec 27th
    Not sure if this will help, but its worth a check. Ignore all the Lenovo mentionings, assuming you don't use a Lenovo.

    http://www-307.ibm.com...
  • Evan S. replied Dec 27th
    What about dumping the XP .iso on a flash drive or something?
  • Adam L. replied Dec 27th
    @Konstantino: Looked hopeful but seems to be reliant on the CDROM drive. I think I'm slowly running out of options.
  • Derek W. replied Dec 27th
    Stick the cdrom into another computer on the network and copy the /i386 directory to your laptop. Then you need to make a boot diskette. Boot from that, and then run the setup.exe from the /i386 directory.
  • Adam L. replied Dec 27th
    Evan: Same deal as the CDROM drive, the BIOS see's it but I cannot select it as a boot device. Fuck I'm tired, I'm giving up on it. I think I'm stuck with Vista until I replace the CDROM drive.
  • Logan L. replied Dec 27th
    get a new cdrom then upgrade to XP. :)
  • Cameron R. replied Dec 27th
    do you have a floppy disk drive? if you do, boot from a windows 98 boot disk (bootdisk or http://bootdisks.com) then you can manually partition your hard disk create say a 2gb FAT32 partition and format it, then copy the i386 folder from the cdrom to that partition then run the setup.

    this should work because the windows 98 boot floppy supports USB

    If you dont have a floppy, you can try removing the cdrom from the laptop and then booting from the USB drive.
  • Brian R. replied Dec 27th
    Get a Macbook, or another internal CD drive.
  • Adam L. replied Dec 27th
    Yup I called up Sony this morning to get a new drive. Won't be able to talk to anyone who can remotely discuss it with me until Jan 7th. Oh well, I'm stuck on Vista for a while.
  • Evan S. replied Dec 27th
    Vista isn't so bad
  • Arturo D. replied Dec 28th
    I don't like vista too. You can install it from a flash drive,

    http://www.911cd.net/f...

    If I were you I would get a mac, it has been a blessing since I left windows.

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