no OS found - limited options to restore

firstly, can i apologise in advance for anything dumb i say as my knowledge of computers is basic.

When i start up my laptop it says no os found. Now, i could try describing how i got into this mess but the truth is i dont really know, i think it will be easier at this stage to just say that i have been a complete idiot trying to create a partition and have done something wrong.
I have a system repair disk and a system image disk but the problem is my dvd drive doesn't work(not as result of current problems, just doesn't work).
My question is, if i buy an external drive and connect it to usb, can i use my backup discs from that?

My computer is - packard bell TJ67, windows 7 ultimate x86 32bit
Thanks

Some computers allow you to boot from a USB but you will have to use software to encode the usb device to be recognized as bootable. Go into your bios and see if USB is one of the options in the boot order; if so, you should be able to boot from USB and yes, load a repair disk.

Another option is to pull your laptops hard drive and plug it into another computer to ensure all your Windows files are still there. You should see any partitions as well. If this appears to be the case you can potentially fix this hard drive using another computer and undo whatever it was you did.

Hi thanks for replying.
In my bios it shows usb hdd, usb fdd, usb key, usb cd/dvd rom.
Does that mean i can just change the order and it will work? This is my only computer so using software or your other suggestion about removing drive is not possible at the moment

SLeah said:

Hi thanks for replying.
In my bios it shows usb hdd, usb fdd, usb key, usb cd/dvd rom.
Does that mean i can just change the order and it will work? This is my only computer so using software or your other suggestion about removing drive is not possible at the moment

Your Recovery DVD should boot from the USB CD/DVD rom option.

Yeah, given those options I would try to boot from your external.

Thanks guys