Inspiron 8000 boot floppy NEEDED!!!

The hard drive of this old bullet-proof 10 kg notebook died; in order to install a new hard drive I need a boot floppy with the CD rom driver in order to run the windows install CD.

One other possibility is a bios that supports USB drives, although that is like praying a parakeet will learn to play the piano!

Any help is appreciated!

The model is a Dell Inspiron I8000 Model PO1X Service Tag SJTL01
with Pent III 897 Mhz and 256Mb with dead 10Gb PATA hard drive

Thanks,
Chetanji

 

if you have windows 98 setup cd or up, you can boot from it.

 

Sorry I didn't mention it above...

On attempted boot in this old laptop with a Win 2000 install CD; it does not see the unformatted hard drive and of course the DVD/CD rom drive, as there is no CD ROM driver in memory.

My problem is...
the only possibility to boot the install CD is to use the bootable floppy with msdos.sys; io.sys; command.com and the atapi.sys driver for the CD rom drive to be able to boot.

And...
I do not have a floppy drive attatched to another computer in order to make the floppy bootable and copy the atapi.sys driver to it.

If you remember from the Win 98 days, the install CD came with a bootable floppy...
or have you forgotten?

Is this not fun?

Chetanji

 

What I hoped was the laptop could boot to CD via BIOS.

link

 

Totally thanks for your replys,

I realize now the CD/DVD drive does not work correctly.

Yes, I hit F12, and select CD boot first and just slides right past into the unrecognized, unformatted hard drive.

I did do a firmware update on this Toshiba SD-c2502 before the HD died but it still would only play DVD movies and not recognize any/all data disks.
This is a strange problem.

This bios only allows boot from floppy, hard drive, CD drive, and network.
And will allow a floppy to boot to.

Thanks brainstew!
Chetanji

 

just to be sure, do you have the Dell Resource CD (the drivers for your other dell notebook and also has dell diagnostics on it) or a Windows XP cd?

i am quite sure that these discs are bootable, but maybe its possible that the windows 2000 cd is not bootable?

also when you boot from cd: power on laptop, wait and press F12, then insert cd.. wait until it spins up and stops, then select boot from cd on that F12 menu

 

Will try your advised method of waiting after F12 and selecting in said manner. Good god, I will do a 5 minute headstand before selecting and pressing CR on boot from CD if it is required!

Even when the hard drive worked,
any bootable CD WinXPSP2/SP3, Win2000, even Linux distro's that I have installed over the years, do not meet any acceptable screen like..
"please press any key to boot from CD..." when inserted.

If I can get the Hard Drive setup correctly for this laptop's chipset in order to boot from it I will do some type of diagnostics on it.

This is the type of problem to give graduating network specialists/technicians a look at for the bonus part of final exam.
You know, sort of like,...

"If anyone can format the Hard Drive and install any OS that the laptop will boot into, with the goofy CD/DVD rom drive and working flopply drive you will get an extra 25 points on this final and my great admiration!"

You will have my great admiration if I can get this to work!
Chetanji

 

What I need is a new CD/DVD drive that will work for this laptop.

Has anyone heard of a cheap way to replace an old laptop's
Toshiba SD-c2502 CD/DVD drive?

Thanks,
Chetanji