CD-ROM down... but wish to run a recovery disk!!

[Rasu]

My laptop's CD-ROM is not working. I wish to do a total system restore using the Recovery CD, as a last ditch effort to revive the CD-ROM, and also because I now have a new laptop, and wish to pass on this older one to my (lucky) wife!

The problem is ... how do I run the recovery CD when the CD-ROM is down??

Can I copy the contents of the CD to the hard drive (I have a crossover cable) and then run this from here? I would guess this may not work, as it will get formatted too! HELP!!

[DougL]

Hi Rasu

i think It may be possible to connect via crossover and share the new laptop CD drive. Worth a try

Doug

[Statica]

Highly doubt it will work. Usually restore CD's are bootable CDs with a ghosted image, highly unlikely that you will be able to get a networked option on those boot CDs. Since you are doing a total restore, the option would likely require you to boot from CD (which then halts your network)

One way to do it, and this may be complicated, is to find out the type of image file the recovery CD has (ie. the program that created it), and then try to make a network boot disk out of it.