Need help with this newbie

[deadlybiohazard]

I got a old Campaq Presario 2500 that got the Cd-Rom all busted up and someone in my family cleared up the HD and none of the computers of my house dont got Floppy Disk Drives, is it possible to take out the HD from the laptop and connected to a desktop with a USB to IDE adapter an disconnecting the HD inside of the PC and not damgeing the MBR of the other computer( My sisters computer if i mess that up i my have to get another house) or if i can use my Apple PPC G4 to do it better yet but i dont tjink its possible, plz help, thanks in advance

[y@w]

So, basically you want to take the hard drive out of a laptop and boot up that drive using a desktop? That *might* work as long as the desktop has similar hardware as the laptop and supports booting from USB devices. As long as you disconnect the original drive inside the desktop you'll be fine. Once you're done, just disconnect the laptop drive and plugin the desktop drive again.

[deadlybiohazard]

Actually i want to install Ubuntu on the laptop but no way possible with out doing that can it be done

[AlecJ]

No just but a new cheap HD and swap it out when you need, then it's yours and you can't upset anything.

[ByteJuggler]

Actually i want to install Ubuntu on the laptop but no way possible with out doing that can it be done

Can the laptop be set to boot from a USB device? (E.g. external disk or USB flash drive?) If so, you can put the Ubuntu install CD on USB flash drive and install from there, with a bit of fiddling.

[y@w]

Actually i want to install Ubuntu on the laptop but no way possible with out doing that can it be done

Oh I see. The only thing would be if you could boot off a USB device (which I doubt) or replace the CD-ROM if that's possible. You could also load the OS on it using the desktop and then bring the drive over.. but you'll need some way to get any drivers that you need onto the hard drive first so it can boot up and connect to other devices so you can get it fully functioning. All are long shots at best..

[hotrod6657]

I wouldn't be surprised if you can set the bios to boot from a usb device. I don't know how you would go about burning the iso image to the flash drive and making it bootable.

The same would work with a USB cd drive.

Do you know how to access the bios on that laptop? If you do see if you can change the boot order and have usb drive set as the first thing to boot from. Or just post a list of the boot options you have in the bios. you don't happen to know anyone with the same laptop do you? You could just borrow their CD drive or use their laptop as a mule and put your hard drive in it.

hotrod

[ByteJuggler]

Which model do you have exactly? And what BIOS revision? In any case, this thread here, may be useful/relevant.

[hyper_ch]

It is advised to use a descriptive topic title; that means use a topic title that gives some clue about the content in the thread itself...

A generic topic title like "noob here" or "need help" does not help at all. As you may have notices, just about everyone posting in here has some kind of a problem or issue or question