Windows 7: XPS Boot From USB

I managed to screw up my hard drive using ptedit32.exe while trying to remove the security partition on a flash drive. I was successful in doing so but I managed to copy the table code over to the HDD as well and now my computer believes its hard drive is a 4GB flash drive.

I attempted to reboot the system with a Windows 7 bootable USB, but my XPS M1530 will not recognize the device. When starting up the system, I pressed F12 to choose the device to boot from and the USB HDD did not appear. There isn't much I can do with my laptop right now to change any settings other than the BIOS.

If that isn't enough, my optical drive is completely shot and hasn't worked for a year now, I assume the hardware is the issue. This is a problem cause I was planning on putting in an old Win XP CD if all else failed and worked my way up from there. If anyone has any sort of ideas (other than pressing F12 and choosing USB) I'd be glad to hear it.

EDIT: What happens after I power up: Dell Splash screen followed by a black screen "No bootable devices". The only thing I can do is run an onboard diagnostics which turns up nothing and enter BIOS.


-Alex

Can you get a different USB stick and try booting off of that? If you corrupted your HDD in this proccess it could be possible that you corrupted the USB stick as well. Otherwise, get a USB DVD Drive >> http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCateg...-CD-DVD-Drives

Did the USB boot before the edit?

To notsogreymatter: I used a different USB drive than the one I was working with before, I thought it would be best to avoid errors. It's a Verbatim 4GB. I will try using another flash drive but I'm not sure if I have any more with a 4GB capacity. I tried my local computer store and they said they don't sell external optical drives anymore, I'll keep looking.

To WindowsStar: I never had the need to boot off a USB before, I was wondering if this was a common problem for XPS users or it was an issue on my end.

can you boot from an external dvd drive connected thru usb? if not, i think the only solution is to remove the internal hdd of your laptop and fix it in another computer.

I think your best bet is to do a repair install or system restore. You should be able to do a system restore w/out a usb disk or dvd drive, but if you want to do the repair install you'll need one or the other.

have you the latest bios ? also ensure you have it set to enable boot from usb , im sure you will already have this link but i will post it just in case Drivers & Downloads

Ok, maybe I am missing something here. I thought you said you cannot boot a DVD because your drive is bad or something. Maybe I assumed you booted USB to install Windows 7? How did you originally install Windows 7. If you did from DVD and the drive is now bad and you don't have a bootable USB Windows 7 then you may be left with what others have suggested and removing the drive from the machine and putting it into another to do the repair.

To anwser the question on the original install, I downloaded (may the gods smite me XP) Win 7 and mounted the .iso file and installed using a virtual drive. I never booted off a disk or flash drive.

Pebbly: You might be right, I had to reinstall all the drivers when I formatted the drive a year or so ago but I'm fairly sure I downloaded all the listed ones. Either way, I can't access anything on the computer so I wouldn't be able to install the new bios driver anyways. Boot order is: USB, CD/DVD, Diskette Drive (?), NIC, HDD

notsogreymatter: Is there any way to run a system restore without having access to the HDD? RIght now I don't have many options.

PS: I updated the original post to make the problem more clear.

Alzar, if you can enter the bios,load the bios defaults, if that does not work do you have access to a desktop pc that you could place the laptop hdd in( provided it has a spare sata connection) and reformat the hdd , as a last resort you can always power up the laptop and press the "end" key at the same time that will do a factory reset of the bios