Can I Format This ?

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bowtieman

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Joined
May 25, 2005
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Hi.i was thinking of buying a panasonic toughbook from the classifieds but it has no cd drive,it only has a floppydrive,the cd drive is optional and it dont come with one.I wanted to reformat it because its not running too well,i was wondering if i was to buy a external usb cd drive could i reformat with it or do i need the cd drive thanx. :)
 
I have never been able to boot from a USB cdrom/floppy drive/flash drive

Your best bet would be to take the HDD out of the laptop, slave it on your main computer and partition the drive up. Make a 1gb or so partition and copy the entire windows install folder over onto it (make sure the partition is FAT32)

Next format the rest of the unallocated space into NTFS and make a win98 bootable floppy..

put the drive back into the laptop, boot off the floppy into dos and run the windows installer.

This way, if you ever need to reformat again, you can just pop in a floppy and run the installed and format.


Best of luck!
 
Will those those two ways work if u need the password,cause it needs a password to log on and the person that owns the laptop is out of town for a couple of weeks and his brother is going to sell it for him and he don't know the password and i want to buy it tommorrow?
 
bowtieman said:
Will those those two ways work if u need the password,cause it needs a password to log on and the person that owns the laptop is out of town for a couple of weeks and his brother is going to sell it for him and he don't know the password and i want to buy it tommorrow?
Click to expand...

no, you won't need a password..
couple times I did something as much challenging - reinstalling os on a SONY VAIO, with no internal fdd/ optical drive.. ;)
 
does that mean i'll have win98 or xp?
khanable said:
I have never been able to boot from a USB cdrom/floppy drive/flash drive

Your best bet would be to take the HDD out of the laptop, slave it on your main computer and partition the drive up. Make a 1gb or so partition and copy the entire windows install folder over onto it (make sure the partition is FAT32)

Next format the rest of the unallocated space into NTFS and make a win98 bootable floppy..

put the drive back into the laptop, boot off the floppy into dos and run the windows installer.

This way, if you ever need to reformat again, you can just pop in a floppy and run the installed and format.


Best of luck!
Click to expand...
 
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