Hi all,
heres my problem.
i have an old HP pavilion xf315 that i bought second hand.
It has no floppy drive.
on boot it does not recognise the cdrom.

I took out the harddrive, put it into another laptop and installed windowes xp. everything looked fine so i removed the hardrive and put it back into the Xf315 and bingo.
CDrom is not showing in the bios.
I t comes uo with a list
boot from

HD
Floppy
CD rom
Lan

The only option i have is the HD but this doesn't load.
I tried loading safe mode but it comes up with missing files and hangs.

My question is...
Can i remove the hardrive again and put it in a working laptop. then install the cdrom drives onto the hardrive that way and then put it back inthe xf315? would that work or am i likely to screw up the good laptop as well?

I can not boot from usb drive either.
any ideas?

You could try this:

Before you swap out the non-working notebook HDD from the working laptop, go to device manager and select the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller and select your current storage controller. Right click, select update driver and select install from a list or specific location. Click don't search I will choose the driver to install and select the standard dual channel IDE controller.

Transfer the HDD back to the "floppyless" laptop & boot first time in Safe mode & let XP enumerate the hardware itself. If the machine is able to scale through that hurdle. Reboot the notebook normally & go from there.

Good luck!

"....& let XP enumerate the hardware itself. If the machine is able to scale through that hurdle."

The hurdle:
If the hardware on the two mboards, primarily the main chipset, is too different, XP or 2000 won't load. Typically in that case you see the first bit of Windows graphics, then a black screen with a blinking cursor top left and nothing further happens.

Replacement CD drives or removable CD drive modules for older laptops are cheap and you can often get even cheaper to buy generic ones that are compatible. Same goes for floppy drives or removable floppy drive modules. Search for CD drives and/or laptop parts using the make and model number, or you can search using the model number found on the CD or floppy unit, or you can use the HP part number to search with, which you should be able to find here:
http://partsurfer.hp.com/cgi-bin/sp...
A used floppy unit is fine; don't bother buying a used CD unit.

"I t comes uo with a list
boot from

HD
Floppy
CD rom
Lan"

If you can make a boot order list there, if you can list floppy first (on top) CD rom second, hard drive third, you usually don't have to change it again. Floppy must be before CD rom in the boot order, or a bootable floppy won't be recognized.