[pchelpers] no cd-drive

Are you guys ready for another wild ride? Here we go.

A guy brought in his Toshiba Satellite 1805 laptop cause it was running 
slow. It was given to him and
he wanted to know if I could move the OS to a cd, wipe the drive and put 
the OS back. That tells you
how much he knows about computers :-)  As he was leaving he asked if i 
could clean the cd-drive eye cause
it has stopped reading cds.

So I do all the normal things like cleaning out viruses, spyware, temps 
files and such. (using a jump drive to install the programs)
Then it came time to defrag (Window XP home) I click the defrag button 
and nothing happens. Something is not right with
this system. I need to do a SFC. But wait. There is no cd-drive. So I 
check out the drive first. In Hardware manager the
cd-drive (Teac-DVD- sp?) has a yellow mark. It says that the cd drivers 
couldn't be loaded cause they were corrupted or
missing. I tried all the normal things, uninstall, reinstall, yellow 
mark will not go away. I checked the Toshiba website and they said
there were no cd drivers to download cause the drive used the normal 
drivers and Windows had them built in. Now I'm thinking that
this system is corrupted. Time to start thinking about a repair install. 
So I test the cd-drive out in Dos. It works just find, which tells
me that it isn't a hardware problem. On to the install.

I get the repair install going just fine. It is humming along copying 
files when it comes to a stop saying that it can't locate the 
d:\i386\ASMS folder
on the cd. The setup program just lost the cd-drive. You know what that 
means? I'm stuck! the setup can't go on, and the OS isn't complete enough
to get back into windows.

I now pulled the drive out of the laptop and slaved it to my computer. I 
copy the whole i386 folder to the hard-drive. Then I go on with
the reinstall. Now when it came up with the message about not finding 
the file I type the address by hand (c:\i386) Setup is happy with this.
Soon it switches screens to installing device drivers. Half way through 
the blue line stops. It stays that way for 3 hours. It isn't locked down.
The screens are moving and switching and the dots are scrolling. What i 
think is happening is that the dumb thing is searching for drivers
on the cd. It isn't giving me the option to point it to where the 
drivers are. Back to the drawing board.

I got it. How about copying the whole XP cd to the hard-drive and 
running setup from the drive. One problem. It is call NTFS. how do i access
a NTFS drive to execute setup. All the NTFS boot disks that i have will 
only read and move NTFS files, not execute them. So I thought I see if I 
could run setup
from the recovery console. When I tried to cd to the XPCD folder all i 
got was "Access Denied"

I have one more chance. I used Recovery Console to move all the files 
from c:\windows\repair over to c:\windows\system32\config
Now I'm back into windows. tho I'm in under a new user profile and have 
30 days for activation. After playing around with all the users
folders i got his desktop and files and settings back.

Now I'm back to square one. No cd-drive. But his computer is now running 
a whole lot faster.

Pc


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