Could I boot from an external CD drive

[NickC]

I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with Win XP Professional.

THE CD (D) Drive on my laptop is malfunctioning, it is not reading any CD.
I guess I have to replace it eventually. I am currently using my external
CD Backpack drive to read and write CD's.

I need to format my hard drive and reinstall Win XP Professional.

How could I boot up from this external drive to reinstall XP from DOS. Or
any suggestions as to how I could reinstall XP from my external drive

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Unless your BIOS boot options permit booting from
an external device, you won't be able to.

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User
Microsoft Newsgroups

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:

| I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop with Win XP Professional.
|
| THE CD (D) Drive on my laptop is malfunctioning, it is not reading any CD.
| I guess I have to replace it eventually. I am currently using my external
| CD Backpack drive to read and write CD's.
|
| I need to format my hard drive and reinstall Win XP Professional.
|
| How could I boot up from this external drive to reinstall XP from DOS. Or
| any suggestions as to how I could reinstall XP from my external drive

 

[Guest]

During booting press "F2" and/or delete to bring up the bios setup. Now go to
"boot" tab by right-arrow. There you should find a list of all boot devices
supported by your bios. If you can see the external cd drive there then you
can boot from that.

 

[NickC]

I don't see the external drive. But is there a way to edit the config.sys
or autoexec.bat file to point to my external CD drive (Drive E).
By the way, I did cmd run ant typed edit autoexec.bat. I got a blank
screen. Same for config.sys. Any ideas???