Hard Drive

[Solent]

Does anybody on the forum know of a tool / utility that would make a hard drive bootable. The laptop that it came from has no CD Drive so I have a hooked it up using a USB to IDE cable and Windows recognizes the drive in Windows Explorer. Windows XP etc has now got a Format /s facility.

Thanks, you can tell I'm a coder and not support

[daviejones]

In XP, dont you just copy the relevant files to the root...yeah, I also forget...

[Platypus]

In XP, dont you just copy the relevant files to the root...yeah, I also forget...

No, you need a Master Boot Record.

[Platypus]

Does anybody on the forum know of a tool / utility that would make a hard drive bootable. The laptop that it came from has no CD Drive so I have a hooked it up using a USB to IDE cable and Windows recognizes the drive in Windows Explorer. Windows XP etc has now got a Format /s facility.

Thanks, you can tell I'm a coder and not support

I'm not sure what you're trying to do here. Put the hard drive back into the laptop when done and boot that up? Into XP? Unlikely that would work because the windows installation process installs so many hardware-specific drivers etc that moving a hard drive from one machine to another rarely works (even if windows manages to boot, it's usually a mess to sort out driver issues).

Do you have an external USB CD you could hook into the laptop, boot the Windows XP CD from that then install XP onto the hard drive?

[Solent]

The Laptop is relatively old, and as such has no way of booting from a USB Device, I have checked the BIOS Settings hence going through a USB to IDE. I have a legitimate copy of Windows, so I can copy the files onto the hard drive and run setup from there but its a case of getting the bl**dy thing to boot up. I can copy the NTDETECT, ntldr files etc but how do you make a master boot record MBR etc

Appreciate the help

[daviejones]

http://www.softwaretipsandtricks.com...-under-xp.html


This may help.

Hope it works ok.

[Platypus]

The Laptop is relatively old, and as such has no way of booting from a USB Device, I have checked the BIOS Settings hence going through a USB to IDE. I have a legitimate copy of Windows, so I can copy the files onto the hard drive and run setup from there but its a case of getting the bl**dy thing to boot up. I can copy the NTDETECT, ntldr files etc but how do you make a master boot record MBR etc

Appreciate the help

Here's what I'd do: connect the hard-drive to your desktop as drive C (i.e. on IDE channel 0) then boot the desktop with a Windows 98 floppy, then format C: /s

This will enable the hard-drive to boot up to the dos prompt.

You will probably need an adapter to connect the laptop hard-drive to the desktop.

However there must be utilities out there on the net to do this. A quick google shows plenty of people asking similar questions. I suspect you'll find an answer in there somewhere.

[Platypus]

Also, found this:
http://www.commodore.ca/windows/make..._usb_drive.htm

Says procedure will work with USB connected hard-drive too.

[VectraMan]

Does't Fdisk do the bootable thing to the partition?

By setting it active or something...

I do this so rarely that I tend to forget.

It needs to be marked as an active partition I had this recently trying to setup XP Embedded on a virtual machine: format /s and put all the boot.ini and the OS onto the virtual hard disk but it just wouldn't boot from it. I'd forgotten the active option when creating the partition.

[EvilWeevil]

If it's that old, buy a new laptop.