How Do I change the default CD Drive...???

[Rohit Bora]

I am running Win-2000 Professional on my laptop but my CD
ROM in my laptop is not working. I use and external CD
writer to read any CD's or to install any program or
software onto my laptop.It works fine inmost of the cases.
But, due to some reason when I try upgrading my Operating
system to Windows-XP or any other Windows Operating
System, the system just reads my CD ROM in my computer
which is not working, or the Floppy drive, and not the
external CD RW. Therefore, I am not able to upgrade my
operating system on my machine. Does anyone have any idea
how to change my default CD Drive to my external CD RW
rahter than my faulty internal CD ROM?
Any help will be really appreciated.

Roy.

 

[Vanguard]

I am running Win-2000 Professional on my laptop but my CD
ROM in my laptop is not working. I use and external CD
writer to read any CD's or to install any program or
software onto my laptop.It works fine inmost of the cases.
But, due to some reason when I try upgrading my Operating
system to Windows-XP or any other Windows Operating
System, the system just reads my CD ROM in my computer
which is not working, or the Floppy drive, and not the
external CD RW. Therefore, I am not able to upgrade my
operating system on my machine. Does anyone have any idea
how to change my default CD Drive to my external CD RW
rahter than my faulty internal CD ROM?
Any help will be really appreciated.

Roy.

The internal CD-ROM drives gets used because your BIOS knows how to
support ATA drives on its motherboard's IDE ports. It doesn't know how
to support USB or SCSI drives. Since these are driver-supported
devices, you need to load a driver BEFORE you can access that device.
You can't boot using a CD in a driver-supported drive because the driver
hasn't been loaded yet to allow access to that device. You'll need to
create a bootable floppy that also loads a driver to support your
external CD-RW drive so you can then access its files and run programs
on it. If you don't have MS-DOS or Windows 9x-ME to create a bootable
floppy, go to http://www.bootdisk.com. You'll then have to edit
config.sys and autoexec.bat to add support for the external drive (which
could be USB or SCSI but you neglect to mention).