Hello, I want to reinstall my windows (I have posted this before) but as my internal CD drive for my laptop is not working I was wondering if anybody knew if it was possible to boot from my external USB CD Drive. If so, how can it be done? Thanks

Argentus, SWAG, seems to me it oughta work. Only caveat I can see is to make sure your BIOS knows to look there for the necessary files. HTH. Ed in Texas.

I don't think all BIOS allow for USB Booting. This article demonstrates that some do however. Tomorrow the Stars!

Even if you manage to boot to USB, Windows XP will not load. Windows XP is house-trained by Uncle Billy to not install itself on external hard drives. i_XpUser

Do you have a floppy drive for "my laptop"? Can you look around, and do you have DOS based drivers for the USB drive? You CAN launch an XP installation from DOS in some cases. I know nothing of Dell laptops--have you been to the support website, and read your user manual? Can you get into the setup/bios? Is there an option to boot from a USB device?

im guessing your BIOS wont support a USB boot, if it does then just set USB to boot before HDD. Here's an option that you may not have thought of. 1) Purchase a 2.5" -> 3.5" IDE adapter (>$10 and very handy to have) 2) Pull the hard drive out of the laptop. 3) Slap it into a regular PC. 4) Format the drive. 5) Copy the i386 from the XP CD to the newly formatted drive. 6) You could do one of two things from here. a) Install MS-DOS/PC-DOS/FreeDOS on the laptop drive and install it back in the laptop. Boot into DOS, then start winnt from the i386 folder. 'b) Connect ONLY the laptop drive to the regular PC and start the XP install. (Boot from floppy, etc. and start winnt from i386 folder.) When you get to the first reboot, shutdown. Then install the drive in the laptop. This option might not be as clean as a), but should work. I have done this before on older, small laptops that I purchased without drives. It has worked well.

Try a live CD like puppy or dsl that can load and run in ram. Then use the usb cd to move the install files off xp cd. Then you would need to run the install program from a working xp install or something like barts or ubcd4win.