Got a neighbour's laptop as he wanted Windows reinstalling. There was no recovery partition, no floppy drive, no CD-ROM drive. To top it all off, it had a 1.8" hard drive which didn't fit in ANY of my existing hardware, so I had to get an adapter off eBay... but I digress.
Process involved putting the laptop HD into my desktop, and installing MS-DOS. Then copy the I386 folder from the XP CD onto the laptop HD and finally, boot the laptop and install XP.
It all went well in the end except I'm going to appear on the next episode of Britains Dumbest PC Repair People.
I put the lappy HD into my desktop and powered up. Immediately I noticed I hadn't plugged the power supply back into the CD-ROM drive. No problem I thought, its not got to the POST screen yet, so I'll just stick it in...
Anyway... there's this almighty crack, and a lot of sparks about an inch from my hand, then silence. PC had shut down and wouldn't switch on.
Disconnected it from the mains and waited for 5 mins til my hair stopped smoldering, then thankfully it started up, and by some miracle it all still works. Only with the gift of hindsight do I realise that plugging a molex connector in with the power on is a proper stupid thing to do.
Moral of the story: don't be a spanner. switch it off first!
Process involved putting the laptop HD into my desktop, and installing MS-DOS. Then copy the I386 folder from the XP CD onto the laptop HD and finally, boot the laptop and install XP.
It all went well in the end except I'm going to appear on the next episode of Britains Dumbest PC Repair People.
I put the lappy HD into my desktop and powered up. Immediately I noticed I hadn't plugged the power supply back into the CD-ROM drive. No problem I thought, its not got to the POST screen yet, so I'll just stick it in...
Anyway... there's this almighty crack, and a lot of sparks about an inch from my hand, then silence. PC had shut down and wouldn't switch on.
Disconnected it from the mains and waited for 5 mins til my hair stopped smoldering, then thankfully it started up, and by some miracle it all still works. Only with the gift of hindsight do I realise that plugging a molex connector in with the power on is a proper stupid thing to do.
Moral of the story: don't be a spanner. switch it off first!