boot from external drive

I'll keep this short and fill in more if necessary. I need to reformat a computer that wont read/recognize its current dvd drive. I've tried to install another drive but it also shows corrupt drivers on a drive its never seen. I would like to purchase an external(usb) cd/dvd drive and boot from it and reformat the current hard drive. Is this possible? If so is there anything I need to look for on the box.
Thanx
Rick

 

Well Rick, why don't we try to resolve your issue with your drive before you have to purchase a new one?

Before we start do you know what kind of DVD drive you have? If you don't we'll figure it out here in a minute.

First of all you said in your post ,"it also shows corrupt drivers." I assume your getting a message box telling you this so we'll start with the drivers.

Try to rollback the driver. To do this:

-Right click on my computer and go to properties, click the hardware tab at the top and then click on the button that says device manager.
- Once in device manager look for DVD/CD-Rom drives and click on the + next to it. (Please let me know what it displays underneath the DVD/CD drives after you click the +)
-Next double click on the drive displayed underneath DVD/CD-rom drives and click on the driver tab.
-Now we want to try and roll back the driver. If it won't let you do this just click on uninstall driver.

 

Alright, to start with this is not my computer but a friends I am trying to help. It is some kind of dell. I had all the information the first time I tried to fix it but have since discarded. In device manager his dvd-rom said drivers missing or corrupt(I think it said error code 35). I downloaded the correct drivers and tried to install but it keep saying "current drivers are up to date" or something to that effect. I tried to uninstall the drivers and reinstall the ones I had downloaded and it told me " no device found".
I will get all of the relevent info and post again on this thread. I think he has contracted a virus that has corrupted his drivers. my thought is that it would be best to reformat, if I can.
thanks, I'll post the info as soon as I can.

 

Before you do anything, see if an external optical drive is recognized.
I had to clean off the Sony rootkit from a computer. After that, neither the internal nor an external drive was recognized. (I went through deleting the upper and lower filter registry entries and still no joy). I kept getting the error code 31 and/or 32.

 

I dont actually have an external drive, thats kind of why I asked the origonal question before I bought one. I'll post the long story next.

 

The computer: Dell Dimension 8300 running xp
the drive: Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616ST

the error code: windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. the driver maybe corrupted or missing (code39)

I tried to install current drivers and it would not let me.
I tried to roll back the drivers and it would not let me.
I uninstalled the current drivers and the drive disappeared, then I tried to install the correct drivers( that I had downloaded to a thumb drive earlier) and it said the drive was not installed in the computer. I used windows system restore to roll back the configuration to a point where the drive showed up again.
I tried to install an Aopen duw1616/arr dvd-rw as a slave drive but it showed up with the same error message as above even though this drive had never been in this computer.
At this point I'm out of Ideas and would like to format the hard drive off of a usb external drive if possible.
Note: another friend who regularly emails this friend had the same thing happen, because they had an hp I was able to reformat off their recovery partition. I believe that they probably both contracted a virus, but I'm not sure. thanks for the help.

 

Back to the original question of whether or not you can boot from an external USB drive.... the answer is maybe. Most newer motherboards and PC's do support booting from USB devices. To be sure, you'll have to go into the PC's BIOS with the USB device hooked up and powered on, and look in the boot devices list and the boot order list. If the USB device is listed, then you're golden. Just be sure to attach and power up the USB device before turning on the PC. Many Dells have a "press F12 for boot device" menu which can save you the time of poking through the BIOS. Press F12 at the first blue Dell logo screen, and you'll get a list of available boot devices; hopefully your USB drive will be listed. If you have a USB thumb drive or any USB storage device, you can use it to "test" the PC before having to actually purchase the drive you need.

 

Thanks I,ll try it with a thumb drive first.

by the way, cool avitar dlb

 

Booting to a thumb drive can be a bit tricky. Go here for more info: http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
Or here: http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-5928902.html
Different ways to do more or less the same thing... kind of.... just read the stuff....

Thanks!

 

Thanks for the info I'll read it all. But just so I'm on message, my goal is to boot from a usb cd-rom so I can reformat the computer, I'm just trying the thumb drive to see if I can boot from a usb device. If I make a floppy boot disk and plug in the usb cd-rom can I format from it?