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{pops head in, looks around fearfully}
I has question. The internal hard drive in my laptop died yesterday. I has ordered a replacement...but it'll be days before it arrives. My netbook is great, but not an adequate substitute. I have an external hard drive that i've been using for storing documents, music, photos...tried hooking it up and turning it on but the system won't allow it. Is there some trick for convincing the computer to boot off an external drive or am i SOL because it doesn't have the startup configuration or something like that?
Might be in the bios/cmos to allow boot from USB, and needs to be turned on.
If I knew what model the laptop was, I could look up the command. In the mean time, try booting holding down the escape key, or del or the like.
it is a dell inspiron 5150 laptop. booting while holding the function key sends me into diagnostic mode....everything else brings the same failure.
You need to boot off a CD or a floppy to install an OS on whatever hard drive you want to work from--does the BIOS see the external drive?
I *think* it sees it....it gets slightly further in attempting to boot when the external drive is hooked up. now i get "unmountable_boot_volume_" as the eventual error, after windows begins to start. Without the external drive the computer gives up even earlier telling me it can't find a hard drive.
eta: correction - now getting to the same place with or without the external hard drive, which is different that where i ended up last night. Hrm.
Has an OS been installed on the external drive yet?
I love my netbook, but the screen *is* pretty small, and I do a lot of scrolling. Is there a way (plugin?) to make the top inch of the Firefox browser vertically compress itself? It's just taking up a huge proportion of my screen, ith a decent amount of wasted real estate, and if I could make it wee I could still see to click things okay I think.
Try View-->Toolbars and de-select some toolbars, or select Customize to drag&drop what you want where. I keep mine pretty minimal -- I have the Print icon and the Search window on the command bar, below that the Navigation toolbar, and below that nothing but the window tabs.
You can do without the Navigation toolbar if you want to free up that space, all the commands on it are available under the File command or by keyboard shortcut.
You can hit F11, and browse in full-screen mode, which will eliminate some of the cruft.
You can also try the Chrome browser, which has less cruft to begin with.
If you use full screen mode (F11), then the tabs and the address ba appear when you mouse to the top of the screen.
