Issues booting windows xp off my usb drive

So I have a dell inspiron 9300. I am trying to repair windows because of a bluescreen error and my cd rom is toast so I am trying the windows xp on usb drive method.

I followed this guide...

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-pocket,1113.html

Got it all on the usb drive and when I go to boot off it it just gives me an error saying there is no usb drive in. f1 to retry or f2 for setup. I had the usb formatted with the ramdisk method because the other method wasn't recognizing the drive whatsoever.

Anyone know what could be causing this? I don't have another cd rom to use and really need to get my comp back up and running.

 

Can you tell whether or not the USB drive is getting powered up during the boot sequence; if it's not receiving power at that point for some reason, it wouldn't be seen.

Also, I assume that, as per the article you linked to, your BIOS is capable of booting from USB, and you've set the correct boot order, right? What about power management settings in the BIOS - do you see anything that mentions ACPI and/or APM?

 

It does seem like the usb stick is getting power and that is also why I did the ramdisk method. (guess it helps force booting from usb)

The system is capable of loading from usb since it is one of the choice and the boot order is setup the right way.

I don't know about the power management settings....haven't looked. I will look for ACPI and/or APM and see. What should I specifically look for?

I have heard that sometimes it takes a few mins for the drive to be seen so maybe I can try and just leave the pc at that screen for a bit then try f1 to retry.

 

If the USB drive's getting powered up during boot, then the ACPI/APM settings question is irrelevant and can be ignored. Try the wait-and-see approach at least once, just in case that solves it.

Also, how many USB ports do you have available on that system, and do you have anything else plugged into the USB ports when you try to boot this thing?

 

Try using this method to prepare your USB flash drive:

http://usingwindowshomeserver.com/2...me-server-–-or-anything-else-for-that-matter/

 

I have 4 usb ports and have a wireless mouse tongle hooked into one port when booting along with the usb stick in another. I will try and pull the mouse and see if it helps.

I will try this as my next step.

 

Definitely pull that wireless mouse dongle. The problem with that is that it, plus the USB drive, may be pulling more than the maximum allowed power from the USB hub, which would cause the USB hub to cut off the power feed - in a serial hot lead configuration, that means that all devices would get cut off, regardless of whether any individual device was trying to draw too much power or not. The power supply to the USB hub would be restored momentarily, but that might leave enough of a time window that the USB drive would still be powered off by the time the BIOS got to checking for a USB-based boot device.

 

I pulled it and still a no go...bah this is frustrating.

 

Just tried the method kegobeer posted and that also didn't work.

 

Well, I'm running thin on ideas; however, it still may be a power issue - do you happen to have an external USB hub that has its own power supply? If you do, try plugging that in, powering it up, sticking the USB drive into the external hub, and then booting up the computer. I'm a little worried that having the external hub in between the drive and the computer might scotch everything as the BIOS may only "see" the external hub; still, it's worth a try if you have such an external hub.

The next one is really stretching for it, but it might be that there's a problem with the ACPI tables saved in the nonvolatile RAM used by the BIOS to store its config settings. However, resetting that requires removing the CMOS battery that powers that NVRAM, which requires opening up the computer to get to the battery, so I don't know if you want to try this one unless you've got experience dismantling this thing.

EDIT: Are you running on battery or on A/C adapter? If you've got the A/C adapter plugged in, try removing the battery entirely and running with just the A/C plugged in.

 

Unfortunately I don't have a usb hub.

I know where the cmos battery is but that means I would have to tear this thing done and I really want to avoid that.

I am running on the a/c adapter. I will try to pull the battery and see what happens.

 

Well I pulled the battery and the same thing.

I did notice though that when I load into my regular xp install it bluescreens right when the Notebook Hardware Control. So I uninstalled it and it seems to run. The other weird thing is all my spyware programs are blocked even though I ran a antivirus and don't have anything on here.

Really wish I could just reinstall windows.

Is there a way to repair the windows files without running through the cd?

 

What's showing up in the event logs? Anything that relates to either the boot problems or the spyware blocking?