Oh shit.

[liadnan]

OK. My technical incompetence reveals itself...

I have an Acer built laptop, with a built in cd-dvd rw drive. Unfortunately, something horrible happened to that a while ago.

Last night something even more horrible evidently happened when I shut down windows XP, because when I rebooted I got something along the lines of "windows/system32/config/system missing or corrupted. Please run recovery cd".

Which I do indeed possess. But drive irreparably fucked (see above) and people have whistled through their teeth when I ask about replacing it. Oops.

Well, I happen to have access to an external USB drive. First things first, I plugged this in, and booted up linux. Yes, I have (mandrake) linux on my laptop. I even use it sometimes.

Linux found the new drive without any problem. Hurrah. And I was able to go into the windows partition and copy files from there so that I have now burned an up to date backup of everything important.

But the problem I have is that I can't see any way to tell the BIOS to notice there's a USB CD drive and go and look in it for the recovery CD, rather than in the built in drive which it, being thick, seems to think is still there and happy.

Options at present seem to be limited to using linux only (which means no internet access from the machine, but is ok for the things I really need the machine for, as I mainly work in openoffice and that is usable even by idiots on linux) and saving up for the T-Book I intended to buy in the autumn. Or going to the men who suck teeth at me.

Ideas anyone?

(I'd ATL but I can't get into any of the accounts subscribed there at present (don't know why with one of them, but the other is a theculture.org address so can't be used via webmail)

Comments

[eccles.livejournal.com]

Just curious, why no internet when you use Linux?

I may be barking up the wrong tree because I am no expert, but is it not possible to get a USB/serial converter plug thing then the External drive could get detected during boot up, maybe.

[liadnan]

(1) winmodem issues
(2) say again slowly?

[eccles.livejournal.com]

1) ah yes of course

2) I had a feeling it was possible to connect usb devices into the serial port with the correct connector. Then crossing fingers it might be possible to detect the new drive when you boot up.

3) I posted your query to the list, no reply yet.

[babysimon]

I'm afraid (2) is not correct - few bios's support boot-from-usb, but none support boot-from-rs232.

Unfortunately I can't think of any solutions to the problem. liadnan, it is the CD-ROM which is definitely physically broken?

[liadnan]

Yep/ The mechanism that moves the eye along the track.

Bugger, I was feeling hopeful.

[eccles.livejournal.com]

Oh, didn't know that.

[hano.livejournal.com]

Is it possible to replace the hard drive at all?
Will think more...

[liadnan]

Possible, I suppose, but I think the hard drive is fine. And I'm reluctant to spend *too* much money because I was intending to send the machine off to a happy retirement with my parents at the end of the year..

Charlie says

[eccles.livejournal.com]

Format the internal drive from linux.

Copy the boot-up information (the basic dos boot files off a start-up floppy) and the /i386 directory off a win2k or winxp CD onto the internal drive.

Boot it up.

cd i386
winnt.exe

...and you can install WinXP or 2k from the hard drive.

Charlie

Re: Charlie says

[liadnan]

This looks like something I could do... and since I have backups of everything now I'm not risking much except time... will prob leave to the weekend though. Am going to pub now.

Thanks to Charlie an' all. If anyone has different ideas, by all means tell me.

Re: Charlie says

[gmh.livejournal.com]

If you need help, give myself or clanwilliam a yell.

(I *might* be able to give a few constructive suggestions, and herself will probably be able to either a) correct me (as per always) or b) take you out for a drink while I swear at the smoking ruins of your computer.)

Re: Charlie says

[liadnan]

I may well do so: thank you very much for the offer.
For the present there's a kind of "ill wind" thing in that I'm forced to do what I'd always meant to and actually use Linux properly. All seems to make sense so far.

[greyarea.livejournal.com]

Is the CD rom actually removeable, or it is fixed?

And can you network it? the laptop, I mean, not the cd-rom.

[liadnan]

The CD is fixed. In a brief moment of lunatic overoptimism and confidence I considered taking a screwdriver to it, but sanity, and the realisation I Really Don't Have A Clue about the insides of laptops prevailed.

Networks. Yes. Ish. It has an ethernet card. But I don't really have the competence to set up a private network (nor do I have anything to network it to)

We are supposedly getting a Chambers Network, in fact it was supposed to happen months ago. But that has gone on hold, first because Telewest made a complete ballsup of getting the lines taken over from BT and then because while that was going on a "heated debate" arose between various camps of members of chambers on the wisdom of buying a new server and how much to spend on it.

I vaguely thought (and assumed it would work) that once we did have said network I'd be able to use linux for internet access anyway, in which case I wouldn't really *need* XP. Though, frankly, I suspect I'd still find it useful for it to be there.

We have an EGM on various issues tonight and the network will doubtless come up. Joy.