Network booting & installing for idiots like me

January 15, 2009 9:22 AM

I have one of these with a corrupted Windows install, and a broken CD drive. It's network-bootable, but I've never tried that before.

Google is giving me forums with information it would take hours to experiment with and sift through, and I wish I had the time to experiment myself.

There's data I'd like on the laptop, but I'll suffer a wipe if I need to. How should I go about this? Or can you point me to a friendly, step-by-step resource, I'd appreciate it so much I'll rename the newly installed system after my favorite answer. And that's a promise.

I'd rather not fix the CD drive. It would be expensive and useless at this point, since I'm selling the laptop in a few months ANYWAY. I just need it to hang on for a few more months while I scrape together the fees for its replacement.

posted by saysthis to computers & internet (5 comments total)

External CD drive attached by USB is probably your best bet; now you just have to find someone with said drive.

If you can boot to the CD, you can run the recovery console and copy off the data from the command line.
posted by The Michael The at 9:30 AM on January 15

The Michael The, that might not work - it won't for me. My laptop will only boot from the first CD/DVD drive it finds on boot-up, which is the non-functioning internal drive. I've tried to remove it; no can do; apparently I'm just not smart enough (despite being able to remove every other "bay" component!).

Sigh.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:23 AM on January 15

You could use this tutorial to create a usb key that boots ubuntu, persuade the vaio to boot from usb (using F10 I think), and use ubuntu to recover your data by putting it on usb or on the internet.

Once your data is safe, you can follow this (warning: long) tutorial to install windows XP on the laptop.
posted by Tobu at 12:04 PM on January 15

You should be able to disable the CD drive in the BIOS. Then would it boot off of a USB CDROM drive?
posted by lockle at 12:19 PM on January 15

It looks like you can't boot from USB drives; if so, you could download vmware player, an XP iso, the ultimate deployment appliance, and follow these hints.
posted by Tobu at 12:20 PM on January 15