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unholy-assassin · 08-22-2007, 08:45 PM

Here's the situation, and I'm hoping some of you can help me find a viable solution:

I have an old laptop. It was used in my parent's office, and since they got new computers I get to take the old one home. However, the use in the office took its toll and now it takes hours to open certain programs like firefox, it can't detect my home internet at all, and the cd drive is broken.

I wanted to reformat it, so without the cd drive I had to copy the contents of the OS disk to a USB flash drive to install XP from there. However, I had over 10 gigs worth of office data I wanted to back up, and without internet access or an external storage drive I wanted to make a primary partition(that can act as a backup which survives a reformat) out of available spaces of my C: using the program called Partitionmagic.

However, while executing the batch commands at startup, at around 59% progress, it gave an error # 1518, something about not enough space. It doesn't make sense, as I had defined an amount of allocation that was well within the free capacity of C:. Anyways, now my laptop won't even get past the start screen--it just crashes, even if I try safe mode.

While searching online I found that people recover from this by simply running the CHKDSK utility from their OS disk, but since my CD drive isn't working that's out of the question, and my BIOS refused to boot from USB. Also, XP cannot boot into MS-DOS mode. I could try taking apart the other laptop I'm using right now and interchange the CD Drive or Hard Drive temporarily, but I don't want to risk ruining a completely good and new laptop in an attempt that might fail and me ending up with two broken laptops.

I want a way to fix this without spending about $70 on an external cd drive(unless you can help me find one in Circuit City or J&R for about $10), a new hard drive, or taking it to the repairs. An ideal solution would be a way to initiate the chkdsk utility upon startup, so I can simply repair bad sectors on my volume caused by the shrinking of a partition, but if it's not possible I'm willing to consider forfeiting the 10gb office data in a reformat (if that's even possible now). Any possible solutions would be appreciated.

08-22-2007, 08:45 PM	#1 (permalink)
unholy-assassin Registered User Join Date: Dec 2006 Posts: 10 OS: XP	Inaccessible Hard Drive, Broken CD Drive Here's the situation, and I'm hoping some of you can help me find a viable solution: I have an old laptop. It was used in my parent's office, and since they got new computers I get to take the old one home. However, the use in the office took its toll and now it takes hours to open certain programs like firefox, it can't detect my home internet at all, and the cd drive is broken. I wanted to reformat it, so without the cd drive I had to copy the contents of the OS disk to a USB flash drive to install XP from there. However, I had over 10 gigs worth of office data I wanted to back up, and without internet access or an external storage drive I wanted to make a primary partition(that can act as a backup which survives a reformat) out of available spaces of my C: using the program called Partitionmagic. However, while executing the batch commands at startup, at around 59% progress, it gave an error # 1518, something about not enough space. It doesn't make sense, as I had defined an amount of allocation that was well within the free capacity of C:. Anyways, now my laptop won't even get past the start screen--it just crashes, even if I try safe mode. While searching online I found that people recover from this by simply running the CHKDSK utility from their OS disk, but since my CD drive isn't working that's out of the question, and my BIOS refused to boot from USB. Also, XP cannot boot into MS-DOS mode. I could try taking apart the other laptop I'm using right now and interchange the CD Drive or Hard Drive temporarily, but I don't want to risk ruining a completely good and new laptop in an attempt that might fail and me ending up with two broken laptops. I want a way to fix this without spending about $70 on an external cd drive(unless you can help me find one in Circuit City or J&R for about $10), a new hard drive, or taking it to the repairs. An ideal solution would be a way to initiate the chkdsk utility upon startup, so I can simply repair bad sectors on my volume caused by the shrinking of a partition, but if it's not possible I'm willing to consider forfeiting the 10gb office data in a reformat (if that's even possible now). Any possible solutions would be appreciated. Last edited by unholy-assassin; 08-22-2007 at 08:46 PM.