I am trying to boot to a CD or floppy on a Windows ME laptop. The problem is, both the Esc and F2 keys are broken, so I can't enter setup (F2) or choose "boot to CD or floppy" (Esc) when the system starts. The laptop is a Gateway Solo 1150.
My goal is to do a system recovery before I get rid of this thing. I want to wipe the hard drive.
Any suggestions for ways I can tell the computer to boot to CD or floppy, or ways to wipe the hard drive, without using the F2 or Esc keys would be greatly appreciated.
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Greetings, rstorey2079!
Boot up with a startup disk with CDROM support. If you don't have such a disk, get one from www.bootdisk.com Select the option with CDROM support. At the command prompt, type D:\setup or cd E:\setup or what ever the command is to start the recovery disk.
Best wishes, war1
Please stop this arguing, let's wait for rstorey2079 to respond, personnally I think StoneG is right and rstorey2079 is only able to boot from the harddisk at this moment.
rstorey2079, another thing you might want to try:
On most computers the default BIOS setting is to boot from floppy, so you'll have to check your laptop if you can reach the backup battery or if you can find a "Clear CMOS" jumper to get the BIOS back to the default settings and boot from a bootdisk again.
Greetings,
LucF
I have tried booting from a floppy and I have tried booting from CD ROM. I am only able to boot from hard disk.
Actually, sigel1, I am not lying, a lot of the keys, including the tab key, are broken on that side of the keyboard, and I don't know how they broke, because it is not my computer, it's my boyfriend's computer. I suspect maybe someone spilled something on it. I'll never award points to someone who calls me a liar, but I will try plugging in a new keyboard. ANd, by the way, I have searched on google about hacking into the BIOS, but the whole point of me posting the quesiton here is to find out what the best way is given the special situation I am in (with the broken keys).
I have not been able to locate anything that would allow me to flash the BIOS on the outside of the laptop or anywhere around the backup battery or inside the place where the backup battery is stored.
Thanks for all the responses so far, and I will let you know how it goes with the external keyboard.
Unfortunately, there is no PS2 port on the laptop in question. There is a USB port, but I don't have a USB keyboard. Should I go buy one, or are there any other suggestions before I spend money?
I am also going to try pressing any key that works to see if I can get a keyboard failure, as suggested by war1.
Is the primary goal here just to get rid of your information? If so, and you can either get to the internet with your notebook or run a program from CD, then I would suggest going with the very first comment here (from LucF), download something like killdisk, and give him the points. Or, if you just want to erase it and security isn't the biggest issue, good old "format c:" would work here as well.
Good luck,
adler77
Business Accounts
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by: LucFPosted on 2003-12-14 at 06:45:27ID: 9937406
Hi rstorey2079,
You can use things like this one http://shop.store.yahoo.co
Greetings,
LucF