I´d really love to know how to do this too. Some bad excuse of DVD imaging software rendered my DVD drive innoperative, I guess it must have messed some configuration deep down in the OS. The only solution I can think of would be to reinstall Windows, but since the DVD doesn´t work I´m properly screwed.
External USB drive? I had to do this when the drive in my laptop would not read my Windows XP install CD. I read in a disk image from the external CD/DVD drive, wrote it to a DVD, then installed from that DVD in the internal drive. (ISTR that it wouldn’t install straight from the external USB drive.)
Yes, I tried using an USB drive, it didn’t work because it isn’t bootable. Dang it.
I’m not quite following you with the steps you took, you had your XP CD, you copy it to a DVD and then… you copied that DVD into a hard drive and did an installation from that place?
Oh, and in my case I can’t access DOS at startup neither, it’s aggravating.
What OS are you currently running on the netbook? What filesystem? If you are currently running Vista, you can shrink the partition to create a new one at the end.
I believe that you would need to modify the bootloader on your primary partition to have it point to the newly created installation partition (basically create a dual boot environment). That process would vary by OS.
If DVD imaging software has stuffed your DVD drive it will only be stuffed from within your current Windows installation. That means that you should be able to boot off the Windows installation DVD as this accesses your DVD drive before Windows has even been loaded into memory. Give it a try…
This software allows you create a virtual DVD drive that you can use to mount CD / DVD images and access them just like they were a DVD disc in a drive that you don’t physically have. It is freeware, so no charge.
Download the Windows 7 Release Candidate from the microsoft website.
Right click on the downloaded Windows 7 file and select Open With from the popup menu. A sub menu will appear.
Then select Mount file with Virtual CloneDrive from the sub menu.
Open Windows Explorer. You should now see a new drive letter. This is your new virtual DVD drive which currently has the Windows 7 image mounted within it. You can now install Windows 7 from this drive.
Nope, that doesn’t work. That’s why I suspect something on the BIOS is screwy.
Believe me, short of drawing a pentagram on the floor and sacrificing a goat I’ve done all imaginable actions, permutations and tinkering to this machine and still no DVD drive. Not even replacing the drive with a new one works. Despairing.
