Reinstalling XP on 2nd hand laptop

KillerWatt

Hang on a minute, does this notebook of yours have the optical drive integrated or is connected it through USB?

If the latter, boot from USB is what you want.

kopper

KillerWatt wrote: »

Hang on a minute, does this notebook of yours have the optical drive integrated or is connected it through USB?

If the latter, boot from USB is what you want.

The Cd drive is intergrated. I have no idea if the CD drive works as i only bought it 2nd hand although the light does flash when a CD is inserted

closed

see my post, how did you create the cd, have you tried F12

Mondez

Kopper, have you verified that the CD's you have created can boot any computer? It is possible that you have burned them incorrectly as someone already suggested and booting another system where you know the optical drive works will rule that out. BTW, you can force toshibas to boot from CD by holding down the C key during post to override the normal boot order from the BIOS.

kopper

Mondez wrote: »

Kopper, have you verified that the CD's you have created can boot any computer? It is possible that you have burned them incorrectly as someone already suggested and booting another system where you know the optical drive works will rule that out. BTW, you can force toshibas to boot from CD by holding down the C key during post to override the normal boot order from the BIOS.

Yes the CD will boot up in another PC and gives me the Windows options of Reinstall etc

full-stop

If the burnt CD works in another pc, then it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the laptop's optical drive is faulty in some way.

If it's XP Pro, last time a friend lost his password and asked me to help, the solution I found was to hit CTL+ALT+DEL twice at the login screen and then I think I typed administrator as username (no password) if required. Not sure if that is still an up to date solution?

Good Luck

Mondez

Looks like your choices are to either succeed in the black art of making bootable USB drives, use an external optical drive or replace the existing optical drive with a new one. The USB route is probably the most practicalfor you since you don't need to get any more hardware, but different systems like the boot information written in different ways depending on what "boot from USB..." options they offer.

kopper

Mondez wrote: »

Looks like your choices are to either succeed in the black art of making bootable USB drives, use an external optical drive or replace the existing optical drive with a new one. The USB route is probably the most practicalfor you since you don't need to get any more hardware, but different systems like the boot information written in different ways depending on what "boot from USB..." options they offer.

Last night I installed DBAN into a USB and booted it up. It gave me the DBAN menu screen and I typed "autonuke" to wipe out the drive. 8 Hours later this morning its still running with no sign of progress. Does DBAN really take this long or is it crashed? All it says is "Loading dban.bzi...." and been like that for 8 hours

Mondez

Sounds like it crashed, last I used DBAN it gave an indication of how it was doing. You will be better off trying to make a bootable usb windows installer IMO since all dbanwill do is wipe the system and still leave you needing to reinstall.

closed

If it has a factory restore partition, dban is going to wipe that, and make reinstall more difficult.