Network repair installation?

[Narj]

Hi chaps,

A friend of mine has got some problems with his laptop (Pavilion ZV5000), however he's not backed it up in 7 years, the DVD drive doesn't work and it doesn't support booting from USB.

Is there anything short of an enterprise deployment solution that I can use to boot and repair install over the network? The stuff I found so far is all for unattended installation which is not what I want (don't want the disk formatting!).

Spares of the DVD drive are really expensive, and I can't find any caddies for the PATA drive he has - it seems to be some sort of proprietary wafer-slot connection, otherwise I'd just recover the files and tell him to **** off and go buy a new laptop.

I'm looking at buying another laptop of the same sort of spec from the bay to nick a working drive from as that's looking cheaper, but if anyone else has any ideas, it'd be appreciated.

EDIT: Found a cheapo DVD drive. But still, if anyone else has stories of how they've got around this sort of situation before, without an unattended install that wipes all documents, I'm all ears!

 

[m4cc45]

USB bootable stick with something like Hirens or Ultimate Boot CD (which can then be transferred onto USB stick to boot).



M.

 

[edscdk]

boot from an ubuntu live or erd disk, rename windows, documents and settings, program files - reinstall XP without formatting the drive.. move his files back from the original documents and settings...

if there is not enough space delete the windows folder, my reason for not deleting the win / prog folders is in case there is something in there thats needed

** i see you dont have a prop-er install disk... you can get el cheapo sata / ide usb converters from the bay @ ~ £10 - simply take the drive out and attach it to the USB adapter

 

[Narj]

Not meaning to sound rude or ungrateful but I don't think you guys read the OP..

m4cc45 - The BIOS doesn't support USB booting.

edscdk - the DVD drive is buggered and I was trying to avoid sourcing a replacement. Particularly as I'm not sure it'll work considering the amount of other things broken on the machine! Also, the HDD has a proprietary connector that isn't supported by any HDD caddy I've looked at.

The system doesn't boot into Windows - I get a blue screen flash that's too quick to read then it restarts. The Pause key doesn't work there.

I have a DVD drive arriving on Friday anyhow - I'll run a Linux live boot and backup everything to external HDD first. I was just really looking for a network boot solution similar to what we have at work, but without the immense amounts of effort involved to get it working.

Anyway, from my extensive research, it seems that an interactive Windows install isn't easily achievable. FFS this stuff is trivial with *nix!

Cheers!