Anyone know if you can boot from an external usb/parallel cdrom drive?. I may be able to get a laptop without a cd-rom drive but it will need the os re-installing. Thanks in advance.
Depends on the BIOS of the machine in question. In principle you can boot off any data storage device. For example, my brother's new ECS K7S5A motherboard gives you the option of booting off one of those little USB solid-state keyring devices (which strikes me as a brilliant way of doing BIOS updates....far better than dodgy old floppy disks). If it is a reasonably recent laptop, it would strike me as odd if you could not boot from a USB CD-ROM if it has no CD-ROM built in...check with the manufacturer to be sure though.
Nah its donkey years old, im surprise it had usb to tell you the truth. They is no option for usb boot.
If it has a floppy, you could boot off a floppy then load dos drivers which should be supplied with the external cd rom.
That would be fine for the parallel version but my understanding is that D.O.S doesn't support usb? Please correct me if im wrong as this be the thing im after.
use a win98 boot disk and boot into dos without cdrom support then type format c:/s/u/q that will format c: and install comand.com and its a basic dos function that can also be used on ne system cant do it with a winme/2000/xp boot disk though
