Install Windows XP/7 without a CD drive when the BIOS does not support booting from USB devices
- by David Pearce
I have a computer that has a dead CD drive in it and it seriously needs a new installation of Windows (XP is on it now, but Windows 7 does not sound that bad). At first I tried making a bootable USB drive, but it does not look like the BIOS supports booting directly from a USB drive.
Is there some sort of boot loader that I can put onto the hard drive first and boot from the USB drive using that? If not, how else can I re-install Windows on the computer?
Edit: The only bootable device the computer has it the network with PXE (although I have no idea how to do that) and it's three internal hard drives