Okay, I have a problem that I’ve been working on for about 2 weeks now for a friend at work, and still can’t manage to solve. He legitimately *acquired* a second hand ex-company laptop a while ago, and decided that he wanted to upgrade it to Windows XP. He tried and it wouldn’t have it. He then gave it to me to have a look at. The laptop doesn’t have any floppy drive or CD drive built in. Although he does have a PCMCIA CD Rom drive and a USB Floppy drive.
This is the current state of the laptop. You turn it on and it then goes directly to a bios password, I then type ‘letmein’ and it starts to boot, he he.then it won’t go any further because of his failed XP install.
I then decided the easiest way to get windows onto the laptop would be to remove the Hard Drive from the laptop and rig it up to my desktop machine with an IDE to LAPTOP converter cable. I did this and it worked a treat, I managed to install Windows 2000 Pro on it, and it installed and booted fine on my desktop PC.
I then replaced the hard drive back into the laptop and started it up and that’s where I am now. It starts as normal and goes through the whole bios password thing which is okay, It then goes through POST, and all the various boot sequences untill it gets to the Windows 2000 Pro progress bar at the bottom of the screen. The bar goes all the way across then just hangs there and won’t go any further. Any ideas people. Remember I only have access to a CD rom drive, no floppy drive. I do how ever have a windows XP boot CD that boots into a dos environment if that helps. Also I can’t seem to disable the bios password. The laptop is a Toshiba.