Compag Presario 2500 Restore USB Stick

hi everyone, I am trying to restore a friends presario 2500 for them, but the dvd drive has packed up...

I have the restore cd's for the machine but no way of getting them onto there to restore it to original state....

I have a 2gb usb memory stick and wondered if it would be possible to restore the laptop from that?

I have tried to copy over cd 1 to the memory stick and I have set the boot so that it accepts the stick, but when the machine boots up it just tells me there is a missing operating system on the stick.

Is there something I am doing wrong when I am copying the restore cd over?

If anyone could give me a heads up on this problem then I will be eternally in your debt.

 

Did you try reformatting the stick to a bootable disc?

Also try using this http://www.noxtek.com/panties/files/1/bootfromusbkey/SP27608.zip

 

Thanks for your reply Flipfire, i have made the usb stick bootable and have copied over the 1st cd to restore the laptop, but it will not install.

On the CD there is a restore and tools folder and nothing else, inside the tools folder there is a couple of executable files and I know that PQMENU.exe is the file that should be run, but when this file is executed, then I get a choice of languages, and the menu tells me that this will erase everything off the hard disk, but when I select english it just drops back out to the dos prompt.

Additionally, the usb stick is seen as a hard drive, not as a removable device, so when it loads up a dos prompt the stick then becomes the C drive and no other drive is accessible.

If anyone has any fresh ideas about how to restore this laptop please let me know.

I also have the compaq operating system cd for this laptop now, is there a way that I can run the windows install from the usb stick?

 

Can anybody help me??