Boot from USB - old computer

Depending on the OS, you can set up windows 7 or windows 8 to install from a usb thumb drive. There are many guides online for how to do it.


The problem is your motherboard doesn't natively support booting from USB and your optical drive is dead. If it werent dead then:

A) You wouldn't need to do any of this, you would just use the CD/DVD

B) You could use something like Hirens or a similar tool that will allow you to boot from USB on a machine that doesn't natively support that.


In this case, I think the best bet is to get a replacement CD/DVD drive. Not sure using an external CD/DVD will work, don't know if the system will see it as a USB device or a DVD drive.
 
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