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Booting my laptop

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by chirag4u4ever

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Hi guys,
I have an acer aspire 1694 laptop and i installed vista after that my dvd drive has stopped working and i think its a hardware issue. recently i inserted one dvd and its stuck in there and its not reading as well. i need to format my laptop and install windows xp in there, is there any way to format the laptop without dvd drive and i dont have external dvd drive or floppy drive in my laptop. but in my CMOS it shows a option to boot from floppy drive, even though my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive. please help me out in this, its very important. Thanks guys.

3 replies

by charlesharris

Heres the question, does your dvd player function properly before the os boots? If so then, I would say that you may have an issue with vista drivers. If it doesn't function prior to the OS boot, then the drive itself may be bad, so reformatting inst possible.If the DVD player functions prior to the boot of the OS, you can simply verify that your bios settings are set to boot from dvd/cd first. Insert your window xp cd. During the initial setup process you have the capacity to delete and create partitions. Delete your existing partion, creat a new one and format it. you'll be all set.

by chirag4u4ever

hi, thanks for that reply but i have already checked for drivers and they are updated. dvd drive is not working, its a hardware issue. is there any other way to boot laptop. my laptop doesnt have any other drive, but i can get external floppy or dvd drive, if its possible to boot vis external floppy or dvd drive.

by donaldcoe

My advice don't waste your money on a external floppy device since almost every piece of software is served in a CD format. Your laptop like many in todays market has a least one USB port if that one is occupied put on a portable USB hub for the additional capability. Purchase an external CD ROM \ DVD which normally operate without drivers except USB 2.0, I would also suggest a Partition manager application there are many I suggest Partition Magic or Partition Commander both come on a bootable CD that load within a DOS environment that can delete and repartition a hard drive just in case you had not made a successful backup of existing data before your failed attempt with VISTA. Save what data you can, you might need it later. The VISTA horror stories are plentiful because a many hardware vendors did not create the driver support for older computer systems. Some devices have been known to fully recover and function once Windows 2K/XP has been restored as Top Dog in the park.

Good Luck

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