Hi, I am currently in Not so good situation. My 3 years old Dell Inspiron Crashed finally. It's DVD Writer stopped working before a long time. While buying the Laptop, DELL dumped all the Factory settings including XP Media Center and Drivers in a Hidden drive. I used to reinstall XP running Dells restore utility. But this time, while restoring, it's giving me error message saying " Can not run Restore Utility. Master Boot Record corrupted". And I am not even getting the DOS prompt. I have a Bootable Xp CD. But my DVD drive is down. So I can copy that bootable CD on a USB Pen Drive or on a external HDD using another laptop's DVD drive. My question is, Is it possible to format and reinstall XP from a Pen Drive or from an External HDD? If yes.. then How? Please guide me. Thanks in advance. Tirtha

The files you need are in the i386 directory. Boot on a DOS floppy or CD with USB support. Then, if your ext drive is u: u:\i386\winnt ===================================== If at first you don't succeed, you're about average. M2