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Okay I'm tired of trying to fix all these problems with my Broadband Internet So I decided to reinstall windows but my optical drive does not work in-order for me to use the recovery cds how do I reinstall windows in my hp pavillion laptop I'm using windows-vista.

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You want to reinstall Windows to fix problems with your internet? Either there's more to the story, or that doesn't make any sense. – Sasha Chedygov Sep 1 '09 at 1:18
there is a lot more to the story a never ending story. – LightHeaded Sep 1 '09 at 1:24

6 Answers

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If you want to reinstall windows but your optical drive does not work, the two simplest solutions would be to

  1. Fix the optical drive
  2. Use an external optical drive
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no money for either already crossed my mind. – LightHeaded Sep 1 '09 at 1:24
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There is another option if you have a big enough flash drive (from an earlier question): WinToFlash. It puts a CD/DVD onto a flash drive.

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exactly ho will I be able to put the cd onto the flash drive – LightHeaded Sep 1 '09 at 1:32
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you could do it in a spare computer or a friend's. It's takes some effort, but you will only have to do it once. – Decio Lira Sep 1 '09 at 2:32
up vote 0 down vote

You need an optical drive to reinstall windows. You may be able to find a hacky workaround to install it from a flash drive or something similar, but I doubt you'll find a terribly reliable source. You might simply be better off creating a new question that pertains more directly to your wireless problem, or even just purchasing a new optical drive.

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If you have a flash drive around, as people have mentioned you can install from that.

They have, of course, forgotten that for you to do that, you'd need an optical drive to get the image in the first place ;)

What you need to do, is find an .iso of your operating system, and then mount that as a virtual drive with something like Daemon Tools (beware the spyware). Then use that image to create the flash drive image.

When you boot, you'll need to go into your BIOS (F2 or Del in most cases) and in the boot section, instruct the computer to boot off the flash drive - these can show up as a separate device, or a hard-drive.

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same problem. if he has already an windows install in the computer, he can uses the flash drive – Decio Lira Sep 1 '09 at 2:34
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Copy the windows CD content into a separate partition of your hard-drive, and try install it from there, if you are performing an upgrade install you can just copy it in the current partition.

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like windows 98 (win98 folder) ??? I was thinking that Microsoft prevented peoples to do that anymore ... It was needing a boot floppy so you use it almost like a network install but how ??? Please tell me how I always been an OS geek, I never keeped an OS setup more than 30 days and I don't like to backup cause I go random to every type of softwares to test mostly anything ... I know that VM are decent but I like my messy methods more hardcore a little ... – zillion Sep 1 '09 at 4:11
Ive installed WinXP 2 day ago this way, by seleting "prompt for drive letter" option. – Revolter Sep 1 '09 at 4:20
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I do not understand why you want to reinstall Windows to fix your Broadband, feel free to raise another question with what is wrong! However, If you know what you are doing,

By far the easiest way to install Windows (and what I do all the time now on pretty much any machine from less than 5 years ago), Get a spare USB stick (at least 4GB), Copy the entire cd to the root of the drive and boot!

With a bit of intervention, you can have Windows installed in less than 30 minutes.

If you download the WAIK, you can make a unattend.xml (personally, I have everything pre pared with the exception of serial key) file which will install from scratch without asking any questions. You can get it from start to finish (if using a high speed USB stick) in under 20 minutes.

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