An annoyance with a laptop

I have this laptop with a dying hard drive, so I recovered the data off of it(couldn't Ghost it to the new drive) and installed the new drive in the system. The customer's CD drive was no good and he gave me this external drive they have.

I was installing Windows XP back onto his computer just fine, but when I came back I found myself staring at a blank screen. I attempted to boot it, only to get an "NTLDR" error...so I wiped the partitions from the drive and decided to start again thinking there might have been a power issue(though it's hooked to a battery backup). However!

Now the laptop won't boot from my disc, which I have in the external USB drive. It skips everything and goes straight to the MBA/PXE boot, despite I having set it last. I have external devices and the CD-rom drive at the top of the boot order. I also tried that "reset" switch at the bottom of the laptop. The laptop powers on fine, though I am seeing this orange light near the "lightning" symbol.

I removed the customer's CD-ROM and put a new one in temporarily, but it doesn't work either. I'm assuming it's not the drive that is bad. I also tried two other windows home CDs.

This doesn't make sense.

I can only think to do a network install...but I'm not really sure how that works.

KG

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Comments

jescab

What is your boot order?

KGhaleon

1. Removable devices
2. CD-ROM
3. Hard disk
4. Built-in Network

The BIOS doesn't have many options, so it won't let me do much except change the boot order and turn off minor settings. I also disabled wake-on LAN

KG

bighornsheep

are you sure that the laptop supports external boot device?

Try to plug in the external cd-rom drive to another USB port.

sprkymrk

I've seen weird problems stem from installing XP from a USB device, whether it is a hard drive or CD. After installing the first time and got the NTLDR error, did you try removing the external device and rebooting?

KGhaleon

Yes, I tried plugging the device into other wall outlets and powered the machine on and off without the device attached. It was actually pretty far into the installation process when something happened...so the external drive worked fine at first. Now I'm stuck...nothing works and it only wants to boot from the network.

KG

KGhaleon

bighornsheep...I love you. o_O Just not in a personal way.

I tried another USB port and it worked, it's booting from the external drive again. I was stressing out about this since yesterday.

KG

jescab

If it booted to an external device the first time it should boot there again.

So it is skipping the first three (3) in the boot order. Hmmmmm.....that is strange

does the BIOS detect the external drive at all?

jescab

BigHorn beat me.....

It sounds like that USB port went bad.

Glad you got it working.

bighornsheep

KGhaleon wrote:

bighornsheep...I love you. o_O Just not in a personal way.
I tried another USB port and it worked, it's booting from the external drive again. I was stressing out about this since yesterday.

KG

you're welcome!

jescab wrote:

BigHorn beat me.....

It sounds like that USB port went bad.

Glad you got it working.

could be bad USB port, but likely it's not a "full" USB port, I have seen several laptops with USB ports that carry a non-standard amperage, so the external device acts strangely because of the lower current rating. I know that HP laptops will have a slightly curved edge around the USB port that have the standard .5A, and all the other one will be more rectangular. On my compaq, there's only ONE that carry that, the other 2 doesnt work properly with certain USB devices.

KGhaleon

I appreciate all the help. Something so simple...at least I won't have to do that again.

I can't believe I did all of that over a port. Now to put everything back together. <_< >_>

KG