Install os on laptop with no OS and no cd-rom

[knamooney]

My laptop is an older Toshiba Protege M205-S810. The laptop was given to me with a brand new hard drive in it, but the hard drive was never formatted. The laptop does not have a CD-Rom drive, and I do not have the money to buy an external CD-Rom. I have tried using a bootable USB, but the laptop is not recognizing the USB ports at all. Is there another way to install an OS on to this computer? Please any help will be greatly appreciated!!

 

[soundguruman]

If it was my laptop I would take the drive out, connect it as the IDE drive on a desktop PC, (use my neighbor's PC) load the operating system from a CD. I can see that the options are pretty limited considering it does not recognize the USB ports. Well with no OS installed, that is to be expected I suppose. Sounds pretty rough as far as options go.
Sometimes if you open the laptop you will find another IDE connector, hook up an old CD drive (from goodwill store) and load it that way. Or maybe a dual IDE connector can be hooked to the motherboard.
Yup, the options are few. The only options I can see is to look inside of it and see what's available or removable. It's a project.

 

[aford10]

That often doesn't work because the Hal.dll would be different. That method usually requires a windows repair, which leaves you with the same problem.

Maybe your bootable USB drive wasn't created correctly? You can try using this method to create a bootable USB drive.
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4900

 

[frog1]

does it recognize hd in bios? if so see if you can find win 98 on floppy disk,upgrade to xp after you round up cd/dvd later

 

[knamooney]

Thank you! I will use the floppy disk option, it does recognize the hd in bios. A friend of mine slaved the drive for me, and the xp disc he used was corrupt and didn't install xp completely so it won't even boot that. It starts to load then freezes. Ugh, it is a work in progress. Lol, thank you all for the help.

 

[tigsounds]

Since you have a friend that can slave your drive, do it again with a difference;

Have your friend (or yourself using the computer you got here with) download a disk setup utility I have posted at 4Shared.com. It's a CD image that will need to be burned to CD, and it is bootable (see below).

Re-partition and format the drive using the utility. Make the partitions both FAT32 (for now).
Do the math on the size of the drive before you set partition sizes... make the secondary partition about 700MB and the remainder going to the primary partition. The utility formats primary partition first.

Copy the entire XP CD to the secondary partition.

When done, boot using a Windows 98 floppy and perform the SYS C׃ command to make the primary partition DOS bootable.

Put the drive back into your computer.
Boot machine and you'll have the good old DOS prompt.
Navigate to the secondary partition (Drive D׃)? going to the i386 folder and then execute winnt.exe.
You don't have smartdrive installed, so go have dinner while it copies the files.
When the DOS portion is completed, and the computer restarts, it will be much faster at completing setup.

Get this file: HITACHI (almost 20MB)


After XP is installed, you can perform the "Convert" on the primary partition and make it NTFS.
If you're lucky, Setup will have your LAN drivers built-in and you can get online to get remaining drivers.