Well guys, long story short.

Very old laptop, Toshiba Satellite 2400 with intel pentium4 with XP Pro. About 4 years ago i gave it to my brother when it was working just fine apart frpm the CD/DVD drive which had given up but i gave it to him as he was startin Uni and wanted a laptop to work. So being the big brother i gave him mine. Now he finished uni, got himself a new vaio last year, so i got the toshiba off him. And here the trouble starts. First off the screen is gone, i mean it looks like someone has stepped on it and it is cracked from inside, u could see the cracks but cant feel em on touching it. I have successfully tried to open the screen which was without disaster, now i could just go ahead and change the screen but there is another issue....it says something on the lines of disk error which i am unable to see as the screen is broken at that exact bit. Joy..isnt it, now i culd go ahead and do a repair install on this machine but did i mention that the disk drive is gone as well. so any help is most welcome. this is going to be my project for mow. also another request is if anyone has any idea where i can find cheap screen or may be they have one lying around which they are willing to donate;-p or give it to me for a reasonable price....I have all faith in you guys advice and might I add any donations are welcome.

Thanks for looking and any help guys.

Raj

I'm sort of in the same boat you are minus the broken screen. I need to do a repair install but the cd drive is dead. Only thing i can come up with is taking the HDD out and instaling the OS using another machine.

Well in my case i am ready to do a fresh install even but since the cd drive aint working, it looks gloomy to me at present. I dunno if it would do any good by sticking the Hard drive in another machine to do a repair install. I m thinkin there is very little hope with this one. I am going to look around to find a drive first and then i ll hook it upto a normal monitor to see if i can repair it and if it does get somewhere only then i ll bother to get a screen for this one.

Raj

Solutions :

There should be a port on the computer to hook up an external monitor to. This in combination with fn - f5 will give display on the external monitor.

You can do the install on another computer but, it will be hardware specific to that computer. The way to avoid this is after formatting and initial install of windows to the computer the computer will want to do a restart, at this point push the power button preventing it from coming back up. You can then transfer the hard drive into the original computer start it up and it sould continue the install, eventually using an internet connection to download drivers ect....

i thought that might do the trick but its a laptop hard disk, now i have opened a desktop lots of times but with laptops i aint sure how it ll connect to another system. I m sure the hard drive ide cables would not be able to connect to desktop hard drive or would it. I know i can connect it to the monitor but its the case of getting the hard disk out and then linking it to my other computer which is a desktop. Is it possible?

Raj

Hey Raj
Some good advice from the previous posters.
Dont you have someone thats willing to lend you his/her cd/dvd drive for you to just install your OS.if you get one than you can use the external monitor as you wanted to do in the beginning
??

There is an adapter available to adapt a 2.5" ide drive to 3.5" it has the standard ide pin out and a plug in for a standard molex thes typically run under $10US.

To Sittas - laptop CD drives are often brand and model specific, the location and type of connector can vary between brands. Also many brands have proprietary chipsets on motherboard or optical drive so that only certain units are compatible with their laptops. For this reason getting someone elses laptop CD drive is alot harder than you may think.

ohk that I have to admit I didnt know. what youre saying is I had a coincidence cos I did it once.maby I was just lucky.

well i dont personally know anyone who could have a out of use laptop to scavenge from but anyone from UK want to donate theirs then am all smiles man. But i ll look for the adaptor first to see if the hard disk can be sorted out first.

After that i ll go to my local pc repair guys and see if they got something lying around which i could use.

Raj