Hi all you out there, I'm a forum virgin and I know very little about pc's. That's why I'm here. I have a Panasonic Toughbook laptop which has no operating system loaded on to it. It only has a floppy drive so I am puzzeled on how to load windows.I have tried to plug in my friends external cd rom drive into the usb but nothing happens. Thanks for looking and not laughing. P.S anyone know where I can buy a cheap cd rom drive for a cf 71 laptop? cheers me dears.
you should be able to boot an OS from an external device like the cd ROM drive from the Labtop's BIOs, its strange it didnt work, what bios do you haave? its the blue screen that appears or you press delete on boot, says name on top ex:// phoenix award Bios
hi, it has info that says its pheonix 4.0, but it is only displayed briefly and then it gives me a black sceen which says 'operating system not found'..as i said, i know very little about how these machines work and even less about bios and how to get to it..is it the same as setup? i can get into that by pressing f2..do i need a bootup floppy? my friends windows xp only comes with a cd rom..
BIOS and setup essentially the same thing. BIOS stands for Basic Input-Output System which is a set of low-level software instructions used for basic initialisation of your computer so that the OS can be loaded. These instructions are contained on a large, removeable chip on the computers motherboard that is referred to as a BIOS chip. The setup program that you enter by pressing F2 is a program that allows you to alter certain settings in the BIOS. Clear? You may have trouble booting from the CD-ROM as it is a USB device rather that IDE. I don't know an easy way to boot from a USB device but you will probably need to boot from a floppy and load the USB drivers from there. This page was the most promising I could find on a Google search. Let me know if this helps.
