Inspiron 5100 won't boot from a external (USB) CD drive

Hi guys,

My Inspiron 5100 internal CD drive does not work. I need to format my windows partition and reinstall win-xp on it. Yet after trying a lot, I am not able to boot from my external USB CD/DVD drive.

I read somewhere that updating the BIOS might do the trick but even after flashing the BIOS, I am getting nowhere. My BIOS setup shows the boot order as 1) Internal HDD 2) CD/DVD 3)USB Storage Device 4) Diskett Drive. I have no floppy drive on this Laptop. I tried disabling HDD and CD/DVD options and booting only from USB Storage device but to no avail.

Can anyone help me out on this? Which version of BIOS can do this? I currently have A32 version.

Win XP - Home

256Mb RAM

30 GB HDD (on 2 partitions)

Let me know if you need other details. Thanks a lot for your help.

Cheers,

Yogi

Responses(3)

E

ejn63

1 Rookie

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87.5K Posts

0

January 9th, 2007 15:00

You cannot do what you want to do - you will need an internal optical drive. Even if the system supports USB boot, Windows (pre-Vista) doesn't.

DELL-Jimmy P

1.5K Posts

0

January 10th, 2007 22:00

yogix

You should be able to boot from the XP install CD from a USB drive, I just tested it and it works fine. If you still have the cdrom drive that doesn't work in your system remove it and try again. If it still won't work press F12 during startup and go to the onetime boot menu, if the cdrom is not listed as an option then the system doesn't see it. If it is and still won't boot to it then you have a bad drive or bad CD.

yogix

5 Posts

0

January 11th, 2007 07:00

Thnx Jimmy..

I will give it a try and get back.

Cheers!

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Inspiron 5100 won't boot from a external (USB) CD drive