Any way to boot from External USB CD drive?

[Airdawg10]

I have a Toshiba laptop with a newly formatted HDD. The internal CD player broke some time back, and I found it cheaper to buy an external CD player so I did. Now, I'm left with the dilema of having no way of getting to the XP PRO setup disk, minus one that I know of.

I made the 6 boot setup floppies from Microsoft's website and did that and then I could run the CD, but I got the error message:

<b>The following value in the .sif file used by setup is corrupted or missing:

Value 0 on the line in section [sourcedisksfiles] with key "sp2.cab"

Setup cannot continue.<b>

After poking around online, this seems to be caused by starting setup with the floppies and then going to the CD.

So, is there any way to boot directly to my TDK External USB CD drive? Or even to load the drivers somehow on a floppy so that I can then boot from the CD rom?

 

[wolluf]

Check the bios settings to see if machine can boot from USB devices.

You can start install from a win98 boot floppy, as long as it can see the external CD drive -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307848

 

[Airdawg10]

The laptop BIOS does not support booting directly from USB, but I'll look into your other suggestion and get back to you...

 

[Airdawg10]

I loaded the Win98SE disk that I got on my laptop, but it can only detect IDE (internal) CD drives, no USB drivers aparently. Any other suggestions?

 

[Airdawg10]

I just had an idea... My laptop is set up to be able to boot from a PCMCIA device... if I went and got a PCMCIA card equipped with USB ports and plugged my USB CD rom into that PCMCIA card, do you think it would recognize the CD rom and boot from it?

 

[allteltec]

I doubt it. Booting from PCMCIA would be a Flash drive or PCMCIA HD I have 2 or 3 of them. My son has a small Dell Extrenal floppy and CD. I bought it used no CD and the floppy went bad and he kill the HD. I put the new HD in a differt note book computer and partistioned the HD in 3 partistions installed win98 on first and copyed the whole XP CD to partistion 3. After puting HD back in his computer and geting win98 runing I install XP from the partistion 3 as a dull boot to partistion 2. The small win98 boot came in handy when he corrupted the registry and XP would not boot. I was able to fix it by booting win98 and using the network and copy good registry files from system restore to C:\windows\system32\config to replace the corrupted ones and XP was back.

 

[Airdawg10]

Hehe, sounds like that was a fun process... That was my 'last resort' option, but I figured there had to be an easier way... and there was!

I seem to have figured out my own problem here. Addonics makes a DOS based USB driver for their CD drives and I used it. It recognized my CD drive, even thought it's a TDK, and I now have access to my CD in DOS.

http://www.addonics.com/support/faqs/windows_OS_installation.asp

PS. Panasonic makes a dos-based driver as well, but the website where I could find a link to it being available is only in Japanese, not much use to me... but for those Japs out there, you could try that one too!

 

[allteltec]

Only about a day and a half of #@! But you know kids and how thay can screw up a computer. Glad to hear to found a easyer way good luck.