Dell Latitude D-400 with no CD drive: How to Reinstall Windows!

[DanGent]

Got a Dell Latitude D-400 here that someones bought off ebay very cheap. BSOD leaving to infinite reboot. Thought best thing to do would be to reinstall windows but alas no CD drive!

Here's what I've tried
- working external CD drive with Windows CD in: Very limited BIOS options but by setting it to boot from Harddrive last it still doesn't boot from CD
- Boot from Ubuntu Pendrive: Can boot fine, only thing is that the wifi doesn't work, considering just installing ubuntu and getting round the wifi problem
- BartPE: Spent literally hours last night trying to follow the guides for making a bootable Windows install pendrive. Quite the opposite of the ease of Ubuntu! One or two places I may have gone wrong but its taken so much of my time already trying this...

Other things I was thinking of trying and was wondering if anyone can give me any advice
- Connect the harddrive to a PC or a laptop with a CD drive and start the install off on that? Maybe reconnect the HDD to the laptop once it restarts after copying the files from the CD? (the first stage of the windows install process) as nothing specific like drivers will have been setup? (just guessing)
- Network install: I've read briefly on this. I think I have to boot from a pendrive then connect to a computer on the network with the XP CD in its drive. How easy is this? Is it more effort than making an Ubuntu pendrive?

much thanks,
Dan gent

[jim]

Why did you set the hard drive to boot last in the BIOS rather than just use the boot menu?

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to boot from an external drive, although if its attached via USB I guess the BIOS could just be fussy.

[nimbu]

With the CDROM drive plugged into and powered up power up the laptop. Keep pressing the F12 key on the dell bios spash screen.

You should be presented with Boot device list, if your cd-rom is detected correctly you should be able to select it and boot from it.

There are some guides on making a bootable usb stick with something like freedos or the whole bootloader from the actual windows CD. A copt of the i386 directory on the pendrive might be enough, though cant remember as i have never installed xp from a dos prompt, 200 used to be fine.

[joel_spencer]

The laptop bios most likely won't support USB booting so buying a drive is the best bet, usually about thirty on ebay

[DanGent]

When I wrote this post I knew I should have explained the boot options more ;^)
here we go:

pressing f12 give me four options

Interal HDD
Cardbus NIC
Onboard NIC
Diagnostics

the odd time when I power it up and press F12 it also shows the option
CDRW drive
but to my dismay, when I selected it, it still booted off the harddrive!

From the BIOS (which is really lame) the boot order is set to
USB Storage Device
Diskette Drive (which it doesnt have)
CD/DVD/CD-RW Drive (again which it doesnt have)
Cardbus NIC
D/Dock PCI slot NIC
Onboard NIC
Internal HDD

this is what I meant by putting the HDD last.

Still, it always boots off the HDD. Only thing I can get it to boot off is a pendrive. I can hear the CD drive spinning but it just doesn't boot.

Any other ideas? I took the HDD and plugged it into my PC to run chkdsk off a recovery CD but still it doesn't load. I'm thinking Ubuntu installed off a pendrive is the way to go.

nimbu - if i understand correctly, you need to use something like BartPE to create a bootable USB pendrive then copy the i386 folder onto it. that way you can install from a pendrive, but after four hours of following instructions, the pendrive wouldn't boot from this laptop or my PC

joel_spencer - thanks for the suggestion but when i say no CD drive I mean that it has never had one. I fix laptops for a living so switching a CD drive is a ten minute job (depending on where they put the locking screw!)
unless I've misunderstood you and your saying that actually there is an IDE port for me to plug one in if i strip the laptop down?

thanks for all your help so far,
Dan Gent

[spoon_]

I've got one if these optical drives if you wanna:



Connectors looks like two USB stacked on top of each other. Should be pluggable at the back of your lappy...

[DanGent]

spoon - wow what is that? on the left side of the laptop there is indeed a USB port with a similar sized (but very different connections) port above it.
found a few on ebay for about £20 e.g.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-D400-D410...item439d5fb973
and you can confirm that I can boot off this thing? that is probably the best solution at the moment. the laptop was only £40 so plus £20 still makes it cheap for a fully working laptop!

[burble]

I've got one if these optical drives if you wanna:



Connectors looks like two USB stacked on top of each other. Should be pluggable at the back of your lappy...

It's not quite 2 USB plugs stacked, the bottom one is standard USB the top connector is power only using some sort of non standard cable.

You can use any old USB CD/DVD drive and boot from it, it doesn't have to be the Dell part.

[burble]

spoon - wow what is that? on the left side of the laptop there is indeed a USB port with a similar sized (but very different connections) port above it.
found a few on ebay for about £20 e.g.
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-D400-D410...item439d5fb973
and you can confirm that I can boot off this thing? that is probably the best solution at the moment. the laptop was only £40 so plus £20 still makes it cheap for a fully working laptop!

Yep, that'll definitely work. I've still got a couple of them floating around at work from when D400's were current.

[ja3h]

I've used this method to use a USB stick to install windows on a Thinkpad X31 and a Dell D420.

It's not hard to do if you've got access to another computer.

[spoon_]

Its a chassis:



+ CD/DVD drive:



Works with Dell Latitude laptops...

Check if you have the correct port at the back (its deffo there, but to make sure) between NIC and VGA:

http://img37.imagefra.me/img/img37/2...pm_d5908be.jpg


Adrian

[nimbu]

Yes that drive should work fine. I have them for our D420's at work. They even plug into out other D series laptops, D610,620,630and D830.

As for the BartPE, im not sure. What I was suggesting was bootable freedos usb stick with the i386 directory from your XP CD on it. No need to mess around with BartPE. Though I dont know if there is a dos execuatble setup file for XP. I know there was one for WinNT4 and windows 2000.

That method posted by spoon looks interesting. Again I have never used that. If you tried that you would get to yhe end of part 5. Plug the usb into the laptop and mach the F12 button bring up the boot menu. Hopefully USB storage deive will be listed and you will be good to go!

[DanGent]

ja3h you are a hero! that winsetupfromUsb software is brilliant. I spent so long with bartPE but by getting the correct version of that software (0.1.1 iirc) I could follow the guide and it worked! (after using the latest version of the software twice ending in failure!).
It was worth the effort as now I'll be able to repair netbooks with corrupt windows installs!
thanks for all your help everyone, would have been really stuck otherwise.

thanks again,
Dan Gent

[ja3h]

ja3h you are a hero! that winsetupfromUsb software is brilliant. I spent so long with bartPE but by getting the correct version of that software (0.1.1 iirc) I could follow the guide and it worked! (after using the latest version of the software twice ending in failure!).
It was worth the effort as now I'll be able to repair netbooks with corrupt windows installs!
thanks for all your help everyone, would have been really stuck otherwise.

thanks again,
Dan Gent

No problem, I haven't been on this forum for a while - glad it helped! (:

[12GaugeShotty]

Got a Dell Latitude D-400 here that someones bought off ebay very cheap. BSOD leaving to infinite reboot. Thought best thing to do would be to reinstall windows but alas no CD drive!

Here's what I've tried
- working external CD drive with Windows CD in: Very limited BIOS options but by setting it to boot from Harddrive last it still doesn't boot from CD
- Boot from Ubuntu Pendrive: Can boot fine, only thing is that the wifi doesn't work, considering just installing ubuntu and getting round the wifi problem
- BartPE: Spent literally hours last night trying to follow the guides for making a bootable Windows install pendrive. Quite the opposite of the ease of Ubuntu! One or two places I may have gone wrong but its taken so much of my time already trying this...

Other things I was thinking of trying and was wondering if anyone can give me any advice
- Connect the harddrive to a PC or a laptop with a CD drive and start the install off on that? Maybe reconnect the HDD to the laptop once it restarts after copying the files from the CD? (the first stage of the windows install process) as nothing specific like drivers will have been setup? (just guessing)
- Network install: I've read briefly on this. I think I have to boot from a pendrive then connect to a computer on the network with the XP CD in its drive. How easy is this? Is it more effort than making an Ubuntu pendrive?

much thanks,
Dan gent

I had a Dell Latitude D400 and never had any issue installing Windows from an external USB device. If you look on Ebay there is a special external USB drive for that particular model. I found one for $39 shipped: http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-External-DV...item414d587290

[Ben Rogers]

you could install it for free providing the laptop has a network card (wired) that supports PXE boot and you have access to a domain controller with remote installation services service with dhcp enabled and get all other machines off the network - you just need the laptop and server networked and make sure the dhcp server on the dc is running as the laptop will need an IP from it for this to work.