I have a really old laptop (Pentium 133 MHz w/ MMX... lol what a joke) but the batteries are still good, and I would like to press it into service. The only problem is that the floppy drive for it is broken, and the BIOS wont boot from CD. For the hard drive the contents are corrupted (NTLDR not found). Is there any way I can fix this computer? thanks in advance...

You could remove the hard disk drive, put it into another machine, install Windows then move it back. You can buy (cheap) adapters to adapt the notebook hard disk drive's connector to one that will fit in a desktop PC.

Alternatively, you could try and replace the floppy disk drive. If the laptop will boot off a PCMCIA card floppy disk drive, that too is another option.

eBay is probably the place to look for replacement parts. [smile]

Does it have any USB and will it let you boot from a USB floppy?.
I know it's old but i've got an old laptop AMD K62 with 32MB ram i managed to upgrade the ram to 96MB (50p for 64MB stick at a car boot) and pressed it back into service for developing J2ME games mine will boot from a usb floppy so it's worth having a go

...my laptop doesn't have a USB port. it only has 1 parallel port, two serial ports, a PS/2 port and an expansion port. And two PCMCIA slots. I've yet to try the PC card floppy method.

it's a dell latitude by the way. 1995.

There are parallel port floppy drives, though I'd probably try to replace the one you have at least temporarily; I think the floppy connector for desktops and laptops is the same.

Once you have a working floppy drive, you can use something like Smart Boot Manager to kick off a CDROM boot.

Moving to Hardware.

Quote: Original post by Ravuya
Once you have a working floppy drive, you can use something like Smart Boot Manager to kick off a CDROM boot.

You can start the Windows installation from a series of floppies (there's a utility on the Windows 2000 disk to create the disks).

Yeah, but why bother if you have SBM on a floppy? No reason in using more of the accursed things than you have to.