Windows on an optical drive-less system

The_Other_One

The_Other_One

VIP Member
Someone has asked me to help them with this tiny Fujitsu Lifebook laptop. I should be able to pick it up tomorrow or Thursday, but I wanted to get this posted and some responses beforehand.

Basically the laptop has no optical drive, period. Apparently it's an option for an external drive. In a perfect world, my external DVD-RW will work fine, but I'd like to prepare for the worst...

Does anyone know how to load windows without an optical drive? I have seen the guides around the internet, but I'm looking for someone with experience doing so, perhaps a guide that can be confirmed to work.

I have some ideas to try, but in the end simply hope I can use my external drive...
 
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if it still has an os installed you can create another partition
try and install windows on the other partition while your running an os?

never tried it before actually wonder what would happen
 
dont suppose you have a floppy drive for it? It doesnt work with XP as far as I have experienced. I assume you're wanting XP on it?
There is a way to do it...but it involves installing another OS first such as 98...it's not fun at all and I think you have to keep your hard drive in fat32 format rather than ntfs
 
aslong as the laptop supports usb boot...if it supports usb boot then you can boot from the cd anyway, thats why I didnt bother mentioning it. booting from a network drive would be effort
 
andy faith said:
aslong as the laptop supports usb boot...if it supports usb boot then you can boot from the cd anyway, thats why I didnt bother mentioning it. booting from a network drive would be effort
Click to expand...

oh i see, but i figured when TOO said :)
In a perfect world, my external DVD-RW will work fine, but I'd like to prepare for the worst...
Click to expand...
we were assuming that usb booting was an option. I figured the prob was the TOO only had the one USB drive and was concerned that it wouldnt work

Oh and TOO dont forget to look for the recovery partition
 
No floppy drive. That's an idea, but I believe if a USB floppy will work than so would my external burner.

No clue about a recovery partition. It's only got a 30GB, so I'm not expecting one... I'll be sure to look.

Installing another OS is an option, over the current, but I really don't like doing that. I'd feel much better if I could get a clean install, perhaps even a zero-write to clean up the HD.

Eh, more later on. I should be getting the computer tonight, but I still can't do much until I get home as it won't have a power adapter. That is unless the one from my Averatec will fit it...
 
hey The_Other_one, i wish you luck ok !!
i once worked on a Compaq Armada notebook with no cd-drive and a bad floppy disk drive and corrupted Bios, i never managed to fix it.
i couldn't even use a usb device to boot, so i just gave up
 
I got the little guy sitting next to me. It's freaking sickening how little it is! I'll get some photos of it by stuff, but even my 12" Averatec dwarfs it!

Anyway, currently I'm up shits creek... The guy gave me an external drive to use(forgetting I had my own??) Anyway, I confirmed the drive works, but it will not boot from this drive. However, I can stick my 256MB USB drive in the machine and it shows up in the boot menu... This being the case, I should be able to do something off a USB drive, perhaps load BartPE... Question is: can you load Windows through BartPE? :P

Well, hopefully the other drives I have at home will work on this thing or else I'll be a bit upset. I was so sure of myself, and I'll probably get an Xbox out of this if all goes well :P
 
OK, so my optical drive worked without a hitch. I'm unsure why the previous one didn't work as it could be seen within Windows, it simply wouldn't boot/show up in the BIOS. Whatever the case, I managed to get windows about 60% loaded before the battery died. No matter, though... A power cable should be on it's way and I'll finish it up next weekend or something. But seriously...how could someone use an 8.9" laptop?!

LifeBook3.jpg

LifeBook_Hand.jpg
 
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