Netbook: No CD Drive? No Problem, Revisited.

by Fat Daddy, Esq. on November 28, 2009

I took my netbook with me on our Thanksgiving trip and had a bit of a scare. I got in a hurry and shut off the power before it was finished logging off. The next time I tried to turn on my netbook, it displayed an error message telling me that there was a corrupt file and it would not boot.  It suggested that I install the XP disk and run the Recovery Console. Great, but as I have discussed before, I do not have a CD drive. I also did not have a Windows XP installation disc with me on our trip.

Thanks to the wonderful internet I was able to fix my netbook within an hour of getting home. I found this site with instructions on installing Microsoft Windows XP from a usb device. I followed the instructions to start the installation, selected the Recovery Console option, ran fixboot and voilà, I am happily typing away on my netbook after successfully rebooting.

I was concerned that the corrupted boot file might require me to get an optical drive but I am thrilled that I was able to find the necessary information and files online to fix my problem without the optical drive.

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