unholy-assassin

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.

unholy-assassin

My BIOS show the following boot capabilities:

Removable Devices
CD-ROM Drive
+Hard Drive
Built-In LAN

Can an external floppy drive be bootable on this? Or an external Hard Drive?

TheMatt

I would remove the hard disk and hook it up to another computer with either an external enclosure or an IDE adapter. Copy any important data off it, format it, and run chkdsk if necessary. Then install Windows (or Linux if you choose) from the external computer and make it bootable. Put it back in the laptop and it should work.

unholy-assassin

I have an external hard drive that's broken. When I took it apart to look inside, it looked like a hard drive connected to an adaptor with USB output. Do you think it's possible for me to place a laptop hd into that, so I can connect it to a working computer via usb?

TheMatt

Likely not, you will need a 2.5" USB enclosure since that one probably used the standard desktop IDE interface.

unholy-assassin

Darnit...is there a converter or adaptor I can get? Or any other method of connecting the HD to another computer without tearing apart the good computer?

TheMatt

Get one of these to hook it up to another computers IDE cable.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16812119020

unholy-assassin

Since the external Hard Drive is 3.5", I should be able to connect the 2.5" hard drive into it by using that IDE cable right? If so, then the external hard drive can act as my enclosure, and I should be able to run dskchk on it! I have no desktops at home, just two laptops (one that's broken, the other that I'm using and is sorta new), so the 2.5 to 3.5 adaptor would be kind of useless if I have nothing that runs 3.5" HDs.

TheMatt

It should work if you can mount it properly. Also check if the internal interface is IDE and not SATA.

unholy-assassin

Okay, I bought a 2.5" aluminum external enclosure from newegg for $10. I removed the corrupted hard drive and put it in the enclosure and plugged it into my working laptop. I ran the chkdsk, removed the hard drive from the enclosure, put it back into my old laptop, and the partitioning continued, this time being successful. I backed up all the files I wanted to save into the other primary partition.

Now, I want to start the reformat, but I can't seem to reformat from my usb drive. It gives an error, something about the version of XP you have is newer than the one you want to install. Is there a way to reformat from a usb if you can't boot from the usb? If not, is there a way to reformat a partition from another partition (like using the partition I just created to boot and install XP into the other partition)? Or is there a way to reformat my hard drive as an external one (where I put the Hard Drive back into the external enclosure and connect it to my other laptop)? Those are the only 3 possible ways I can think of right now, to reformat without a working cd drive...

TheMatt

When you plugged the hard drive in, it should have showed up with a drive letter. When you go to setup Windows XP, it will ask what drive you want to format/install XP on. Choose the USB drive. Is this where it gets the error?

You can always format the USB drive from within Windows, but I'm not sure how to get around that error. It should be like dual booting which usually doesn't cause too many problems.

unholy-assassin

I can't boot from my old laptop, because the CD drive is broken and the BIOs doesnt seem to support booting from USB drives...

I took out the hard drive again, popped it into the external enclosure, and tried to reformat the drive from my new laptop. However, at startup, when I was selecting the drive to install the OS, it said something about inefficient access...

TheMatt

I'm going to go check with the Microsoft Team to see how to proceed further.