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I have an old (2003) Toshiba TE2100 laptop running WinXP. I'd like to upgrade it to Win7, but the DVD drive appears to be dead. While it shows up in Device Manager and Explorer, it won't recognise discs.

I have tried a couple of later model (2006) laptop DVD drives (changing over the adapter on the back of the drive), but I'm getting a BIOS IDE #1 Error message.

Was there a change in the 50 pin interface between 2003 and 2006, or can anyone think of a reason why newer drives would be incompatible with older laptops? Any other ideas for getting Win7 installed without trying to source a replacement DVD drive? I'm not sure if the TE2100 can boot from USB - I doubt it...

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If your MoBo does not support USB boot you can use this tool to do it, awesome piece of software, truly surprisingly amazing.

Be sure to read the instructions and backup your stuff, i recommend adding it to the windows boot menu instead of installing it on the boot sector.

Jim

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Thanks Jim, that worked great! Of course, if I ever put a new HDD in the machine, I'm not sure what I'd do, but that's for another day... – Darren Oster Mar 8 '10 at 10:47
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