Fun problem for you guys ;)

Well maybe not "fun", but I think you'll find me an answer!

So I recently bought a netbook off of ebay. It was "broken", because the person got it from a friend who couldn't figure out how to unlock it (they basically locked it and didnt know what their password was set to -_-). This benefited me since I got the 450 dollar machine for 60 ;).

Anyways, I figured I'd just boot from my xp cd at home, and reinstall the os. Problem solved. Only thing is I don't know anyone with an external cd drive..

So two questions:

a) is it possible to use a virtual drive without being logged into xp, like can I do that in the bios somehow?

b) if not, is there any way to rip my xp cd to an iso image, and put that on a flashdrive, or something of that nature, to boot off of the flashdrive?

Thanks for any and all help as always!!

Sorry for wasting your time. Found a tutorial for booting from usb's somewhere else. If anyone knows how to bypass the security anyways though, it'd save me a few hours..

The USB option is the way I would go. Also nice! You pretty much just stole that pc lol. Had a similar experience at a garage sail once. Was browsing around when the old man asked if there was anything particular I was looking for. Asked if he had many computer stuff (not often you see em at these things) and he said he had an old hard drive that wasn't working.

That "hard drive" turned out to be the entire PC. Paid 5 bucks for it and only had to swap a dead PSU to get it to funtion again. Had an athlon 64 with 2 gigs of ram an a 160gig hdd. I made out well.

Ophcrack... uses rainbow tables, hella fast cracking.

lol, i didn't even know we were allowed to talk about crackers here.

lol, i didn't even know we were allowed to talk about crackers here.

Sparticus247