Give me strength!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's a real life one for ya all. It's a real mind bender. Well it is for me anyway.
My Step Dad has a laptop and the OS has gone west on it. So, how can i do this when
a)The CD ROM drive will not boot.
b)There is no floppy drive.

PS I've tried booting from LAN and it says 'did not receive boot file'

All help greatly appreciated thank you.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
Here's a real life one for ya all. It's a real mind bender. Well it is for me anyway.
My Step Dad has a laptop and the OS has gone west on it. So, how can i do this when
a)The CD ROM drive will not boot.
b)There is no floppy drive.

PS I've tried booting from LAN and it says 'did not receive boot file'

All help greatly appreciated thank you.

you could try giving it a second hard-drive, just temporerily. (i dont think an external hard-drive will work, most laptops have a slot for at least one extra small hard-drive.)
onto this harddrive (while it's in a diffrent computer) load a complet executable copy of the os in question.
then go into your BIOS (or CMOS, i'm not sure which) and set your primary boot drive (the one the computer will check first when starting) to the new, temporary, dirive.
then fix things up as best you can so that it can work without the extra hard-drive.

Where do i connect the second hard drive to???
Also can't afford the luxury of one.
I've got a supposed IDE to laptop hard drive converter but when you look closely at it there must be something missing cos the copper tracks from the power supply lead go no where.
If i could find out how to boot from LAn i think i would be up and running.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
Here's a real life one for ya all. It's a real mind bender. Well it is for me anyway.
My Step Dad has a laptop and the OS has gone west on it. So, how can i do this when
a)The CD ROM drive will not boot.
b)There is no floppy drive.

PS I've tried booting from LAN and it says 'did not receive boot file'

All help greatly appreciated thank you.

If it it new(ish), a USB memory stick may boot (you can also try and borrow one - even 16MB will be ample for a FDISK and FORMAT set!)

Hey, Ye know what, i've got one of them and the laptop has two USB sockets on the back and a little one all on its own.
Fingers crossed.

Originally posted by jimslyp69
Hey, Ye know what, i've got one of them and the laptop has two USB sockets on the back and a little one all on its own.
Fingers crossed.

luck!

Doesn't work I'm afrid. There is no function to boot from USB.