Inspiron mini 1012 Netbook reload

Been awhile since I last posted.

I am working on a Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 that won't boot and has a corrupted recovery partition. Dell has sent me both the Windows 7 Starter CD and the Drivers/Application CD.

There is no internal DVD reader in this computer. Consequently, I have plugged in an External USB DVD player (actually tried 2 different readers) used the F12 key to select boot device and when that didn't work used F2 to go into setup to rearrange the boot devices. Neither method will recognize the external DVD as a boot device or at least will not read the Dell OS disk.

I then tried this same disk in a different laptop just to see it was recognized and would ask to start the boot process and it did. This verified a good DVD.

Any ideas on how to make this work???:(:(

After working on this for a few more hours, I finally broke out a new internal SATA DVD writer, connected an external power supply, then connected a SATA to USB converter to the Inspiron 1012 and it is now loading.

NEVER GIVE UP!!:t:t

P.S. - I see there were no views to this thread. What's going on?? This used to be a dynamic site.

Another way would have been to install from a flash drive.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials...load-tool.html

Unfortunately the traffic is way down here. A lot of us are on the VDR forums now.

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/

Thanks for the reply and thanks for the other link. It is good to see some familiar Moderators and miss others. Sterling-August was always helpful but I don't see him anymore. Hope he is doing well and the rest of you too.

I just turned 70 on August 7 but keep on doing this stuf. It is fun and keeps the brain young.

Thanks again.

JMHCS :t:t

Not long ago, I was facing the same thing with a Latitude D430, and used WinToFlash to install XP and Windows 7 in a dual boot.

http://wintoflash.com/home/en/