Dell latitude c400 notebook problem

hello all,
i hope someone can help me. i bought a dell latitude c400 notebook from a bootsale.it had no hard drive so i bought a new one from PC world. i put the new hard drive in and tried to use my usb cd drive to re-install Windows XP sp2.the latitude would not boot from the usb drive so i put the hard drive in another laptop that had a CD drive and installed windows onto the new drive.when of put the drive back in the latitude it would not boot.does anyone know why and how i can fix it.thanks

It is now set up to run on the other laptop and it may simply not be compatible with the one you are trying to run it in ... Your best bet might be to hook the drive up to the computer you used to install WinXP and install only a basic install of some bootable program that will allow the use of the USB CD drive so that you can do a direct install ... A small Linux install would do it, something like Puppy Linux or Knoppix ...

That said, you may have been duped by the company that sold you the laptop ... It may have come without a hard drive because then it would take you longer to figure out that it does not work and that you will not be able to get a working hard drive no matter what you do ... Even the misconfigured XP install should have shown some kind of boot and the fact that it does not may mean that the computer is just broken ... Are you able to see the drive in the BIOS? What is the boot order in the BIOS by the way? Does this laptop have any usable drives?

The drive does show up and it does start to boot the xp but it stops after a few seconds. i did see somewhere that it could be the. ini file? i looked at loads of sites with a similar question and saw answers like the drive needs to be addressed 32 and the boot ini file needs changing.im pretty sure the latitude works but i cannot use the usb CD to install so i had to use another laptop

It is probably the first problem I suggested if it is partially booting two XP ... There are ways to fix it, but they are generally a lot more hassle that using the other technique I noted ... Basically, you just need to load a driver to get the CD running from USB and then install Windows from the CD ... The easiest way to do that is with a Linux install ... Another possibility: did you check in the BIOS to see if you have the option to boot from USB? Many laptops in the last few years have that option ... The C400 has the option for an external CD, so I would be surprised if it does not have that option ... Is the external CD you have the one that is designed for the C400?

thanks for your help and patience.i can see the hard drive in the bios and in trying different things i have changed the boot order a few different ways but there is no option to boot from usb drive usb.the i am using is not specifically for the dell, it is a sony DVD / CD rewritable.i will try the linux idea and see how i go with that.although i am not sure how to go about doing it.should i put the hard drive back into the other laptop and just install it.

Hi

Dont know if you still have the problem, but here is how i got around it (it might sounds like a bit much, but it had to be done).

I took the hard drive out and used it as an external hard drive. I then formated it and selected the option to make it a ms dos loadable drive. I then copied win 98 (because it still runs on dos as xp doesnt load from dos) and then also xp's setup files onto the drive. Put the drive back in the c400, ran the 98 setup form the dos prompt and ran xp setup from 98.

The things you have to do if you dont have a cd drive....