About two-three years ago, I bought a really REALLY cheap old laptop off of ebay to tide me over until I could get my PC fixed. It was an old Dell Latitude with Windows XP, no CD Drive and not nearly enough RAM for anything other than writing and general internet browsing, but it was $50 and was useful for my school needs at the time. Unfortunately, last summer it decided to suddenly give me a BSOD after losing power. This wouldn't be too much of a problem since a simple "chk dsk" would find and fix the issue, except that I have absolutely no way of entering Windows Recovery without a CD drive. Hell, I don't even have the windows CD for it, although it's not hard to find one to download and use from this computer.
Recently, I'm finding myself in need of this laptop again, since I've been able to access our home PC less and less lately. I've tried to do the USB method of converting a flashdrive to be the equivalent of a system CD, but my laptop doesn't seem to be able to boot from a USB device. Probably too old of a model for it. Only bootable options are the Internal HDD, the onboard NIC, and the cardbus NIC. Without a CD Drive or USB boot capability, I'm kinda stuck.
So here's a challenge for you tech savvy people: aside from taking the laptop to a repair shop, purchasing a USB type CD Drive, or just replacing the hard drive itself, is there anything I can do to try to either open Windows Recovery or reformat back to default settings?
z, did you go into the bios and see if you could enable booting from usb, it could be that the option to boot from usb is just disabled by default and not just non-existant.
alternately i have an old latitude, if you've got the model number i might have a disk drive that worked last time i used it that you could swap in.