[swarner23]

Hang with me on this.....

I have a vp at my company that asked me to do a little sidework for him. He has 3 Dell Inspiron 6000 notebooks (for his kids). Each one of them is having windows issues due to the kids using IM, Limewire, etc. He wants me to blow away the OS and re-load XP. I thought ok, no problem. I get them home a realize that none of the CD/DVD drives work. They are all missing the spindle out of the middle of it. When I asked him he said that they all broke them (as well as 2 keyboards, 1 monitor). I have an external USB CD/DVD drive (IBM), but I am having problems with the laptop booting to the drive. Any thoughts on how I can get the system to boot to the USB drive?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[Old Rich]

and welcome to the Forum

You can look in BIOS for a setting that lets it boot from USB ( if it has that ability )

Many Dells come with a Recovery Partition that lets you restore the laptop to the state it was shipped . . see this for how to use it.

http://support.dell.com/support/top.../en/document?dn=1090151&c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19

 

[swarner23]

I did look in the BIOS, but don't recall seeing USB as an option. I will double check again tonight.

Thanks for the link. I'll have to see if I can get that to work.

Thanks again!

 

[Old Rich]

Let us know how it comes out . . You could always buy one new cd drive and swap it out to where it is needed . . the little brats will have to have one anyway

 

[swarner23]

Yes, I think that may be the way to go...

If that was my kid I would be really pissed. Of course, I make 1/10 of what he makes in salary so he never really even got upset.

:4-dontkno