venomouspain

Ahhhh, found a solution I took my laptop apart first to double check the keyboard, and secondly to check the disc drive The keyboard had nothing wrong as far as im aware, no rips in the slide and no burn marks/loose parts on the soldering, so still unable to use F2 to get into BIOS I had more luck with my disc drive, after checking it out i noticed the metal adjoining the connection was warped out a little, which meant the connection was not fully plugged in, after a few bends with a micro screwdriver it fell into place, and my laptop now reads it I then downloaded a program called PLop, which when burnt to disc allows the user to specify a Bootable object, then saves it to BIOS, overriding the default(or set) boot, Now that my disc drive works, i unplugged my HDD, allowing my laptop to go to the PXE enviroment, allowing boot from disc, then changed it to boot from disc, and used my windows 7 disc with my HDD plugged back in Now in the process of putting XP to disc then repeating this process lmao But still, due credit to tech_guy Arthur and more so mac_shinobi who's method would have worked perfectly if i used said item Cheers people

Yeah man, ill keep browsing for abit though, im loath to spend money on such a old laptop, but its less than i was expecting so cheers mate

Yeah its a IDE HDD, its pretty old lol, and where would i pick up a decent hard drive kit? any online links mate?, wouldn't know what im looking for And nothing, it shows Press [F2] to access bios, and when pressed nothing happens whatsoever, it just finishes loading and then tells me that the NTFS has not been found and to hit any key to retry Note that the F2 button did work before and just after the format, as i used it to select boot from HDD just before this happened -.- I do have another IDE HDD with Windows XP, which i tried to use but the error message changes from NTFS missing, to Operating System Not Found(Even though this does work on its original laptop and when using a IDE - SATA converter on my new laptop And i did try using the IDE - Sata convertor to connect it to my mates desktop PC, but for some reason the PC would not detect any trace of it actually being there ( times like that i want to punch the thing) And Cheers tech_guy, but no other button on my keyboard or a usb keyboard works to get me into BIOS, including using the Fn button, i have tried them all, except for combinations, in with Ctrl+Alt+Delete simply restarts my laptop

Hey tech_guy, ill give that a try now man cheers twin--turbo, im not saying thats the cause, im just saying either way the i cant actually access bios as f2 is no longer allowing me to access it mac_shinobi, ill give that a go aswell cheers mate, at the moment the hdd was partioned as FAT32, so ill give it a try now

Right, ANY attempt to help me with this would be usefull Now the hopeless job The laptop in question, an acer aspire 3660- original parts except for a 160g hdd I had windows 7 operating on this, i changed the bios settings and used custom drivers heavily to run this smoothly, but due to a problem with the graphics card drivers i decided to move back to XP My laptops disk drive is broken, so i created a USB boot for Windows XP- using the added server packs to enable boot During the installation my battery ran out ( rookie mistake) but not after it formatted the HDD leaving me with a blank HDD Now my problem is i reverted the boot back to HDD without realising the HDD had been formatted Obviously it showed a error, and now im stuck because i cannot get back into BIOS to change the usb to the forefront When is tells me to hit F2, it does nothing, but the keyboard still works as i can keep hitting any key to retry when it fails to find a operating system I have tried removing the HDD, and then the bios runs in applicable order, and does find my USB boot, but obviously i cannot install the boot as i have no HDD -.- Is there any program or method that i could use which would force BIOS to open at startup? Thanks Note, i do have another laptop with higher specs, so i am able to download said programs to aid in the repair of this one