how to boot from external

[adbp1]

hi, my mate has got a sony laptop that doesnt have any optical drive, it was broken and got taken out, now we need to reinstall windows but i cant for the life of me get it to reconise the external drive.
is there some how to get it to reconise or maybe put to usb stick or even load to hdd direct. i dont know much about this so im abit lost !!!!
any help please
cheers ali

 

[-=Vect0r=-]

If you're lucky your lappy BIOS will support booting from USB, you will need to enter the BIOS and change the order of booting from HDD to USB CDROM or equivalent.

Not sure how you would do this without MB support though...