we support a lot of notebooks that don't have any internal drives (they have usb floppy drives and usb cdrom drives)...

all of the notebooks can boot from usb floppy, but none of them can boot from usb cdrom.... i never cared about this until today

i have a laptop with dead operating system... the only way to reinstall is with the recovery cd which will format the hard drive (it uses bootable floppy to load the cd)... there is no network card... the hard drive uses a non-standard 1.5cm wide ribbon cable for data (i can't plug it into a 40pin IDE cable using an adaptor)...

now, i need to backup the data on the hard drive... i can't get barts network boot to work as there is no network card and no pcmcia slot... i can't boot a WinPE disk (to use Nero) because it won't boot from cdrom...

is there any way i can boot a floppy, which then loads the bootable cdrom itself?
or can you start winPE from DOS?

This post might help.

I usually use Bootable CD Loader, but if that doesn't work try Smart Boot Manager.

woohoo! I will check them all out but the Bootable CD Loader looks like the best bet so far!

thanks heaps!

Many thanks Troglodyte.

Long time ago that i've lost this URL for this fine util.

i need it to install a Linux distro to create a file server for unattended installs from the network but my old box can't boot from the CD.

SME Server V6.0.1-01