No operating system

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Guest

I bought a second hand laptop computer on which the previous owner
reformatted the C drive and now I have no operating system. I have a USB
external CD drive and tried using an original MS Win XP Home installation
disk but luck. The BIOS is set to boot from a CD. How do I get an operating
system installed?
 
Duke99 said:
I bought a second hand laptop computer on which the previous owner
reformatted the C drive and now I have no operating system. I have a USB
external CD drive and tried using an original MS Win XP Home installation
disk but luck. The BIOS is set to boot from a CD. How do I get an
operating
system installed?
Click to expand...

You need to install drivers that will let the laptop recognise the CD drive.
If the laptop has a floppy drive you can boot it up using a Windows XP
start-up disk - there should be an option to chose CD-ROM support during
bootup. You can make a Windows XP start-up disk on any PC running Windows
XP, or Google for Windows XP start-up disk and download the files. The other
option is to make a bootable CD. If the original MS Windows XP Home
installation CD has been used already to install XP on another computer then
you will probably have problems trying to install it again.
 
The laptop has no floppy drive, so how do I install the drivers for the CD?
You mentioned creating a bootable CD - how?
 
Hey there Duke,

You can get a USB External Floppy drive for pretty cheap at your local
computer store. Also, if the external CD Drive is USB, check to see if there
is a USB Device option in your boot order settings in BIOS. That may resolve
the issue.

By the way, from Windows 2000 on up, all legitimate installation CD's are
bootable.

Hope this helps.

Best Regards,

~Will
 
If I have a legitimate WIN CD and it won't boot, does this indicate missing
USB drivers? And if so, how will an external floppy drive work? BIOS has no
USB option.
 
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