External boot drive

[PaulwBrown]

I have a laptop that keeps rebooting itself, but never succeeds loading the Windows XP. My laptop burns out any CD drive inserted (3 or 4 so far). Is it possible to connect an external cd drive to the laptop and do a reload of Windows XP?

[mattx]

Yes you can.

[srochford]

it depends on the BIOS - most recent ones can boot from an external USB drive

I'd worry about doing it, however - if it's eating CD drives I'm guessing the power supply is dodgy.

If you just want to get files off the machine then either network boot it and copy off the files or take the hard drive out and put it in a USB caddy - you can then plug it into another machine and recover the files.

[PaulwBrown]

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, the bios does not support a boot from a USB port.