HOW CAN I RELOAD WINDOWS ON LAPTOP

[sjm]

I have a laptop with no CD drive, I need to reload Win Me. Cananyone tell me if I can reformat and load win through an ext cd drive through a usb port. If so can you tell me how. Thanks SJM

[j2buttonsw]

I guess you would need the ME startup disk with DOS USB drivers (do they exist?) in order to "see" the external CD. I think it would be very problematic.

[Kerplunk]

This may help. http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm

[smorodina]

I had an old laptop with no cd drive, so I made a partition on the hard drive and copied the installation directory from the installation disk onto the partition. This meant that I could format the main partition and install the os from the directory on the other partition without recourse to a cd drive. It also means that anytime you need to add or remove components you don't need to find the disk. You can copy files from the cd drive of another machine with a network cable, parallel or serial port cable and, I think (?) with a usb cable. The whole installation directory is just under 200 MB, so as long as you can spare that much space it is one solution, and means that if you need to do it again in the future it is already there.

[sjm]

Thanks for your input guys. Smorodina, how did you do that?

[j2buttonsw]

smorodina, you is smart. Use partition magic to resize then create an extra partition.

[smorodina]

If you can make a partition with partition magic and still keep the os intact, then you can copy the files onto the new partition, then reformat c drive and, using the winME startup floppy disk, run the setup program from the directory on the new partition. I seem to recall that I actually used fdisk to partition the drive, then copied win 95 files (because the directory is much much smaller than ME) over via floppies! Once I had 95 running I used a parallel cable to copy the ME directory across and then installed that! Complicated, but worth it in the end. It's a bit difficult to be very detailed in the space available here, but I hope this helps.