problems with bootloader

[Garfield The 2nd]

this is quite a hard one to describe, but a mate of mine has a laptop that should be running windows 7 and has experienced quite a few problems with the bios and the general booting of the thing, it has got to a point now where it has no HDD and no bootloader and we are currently in the process of trying to get GRUB (or something to that effect) on to it so we can get some sort of version of a linux OS onto it, but he also has the additional issues that he has got an optical drive........but that doesn't work either ! any suggestions as to what can be done as between us we managed to get it to work....just, last time, but i don't hold out as much hope this time, and as expected the manufacturers have said the warranty is void......don't ask ! any help would be appreciated in case it wasn't clear our only option is currently through bootable usb or similar, as previously stated, NO hdd or working optical drive, once again, thanks in advance

 

[Kalisnoir]

Have you tried booting from a live distro?

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Get a USB Flashdrive, download UNetBootin from the link above and either get your own distro or download one via UBootin. Restart the computer and boot via USB; at this point you can either boot without installing and play with the partitions there or install it first.

Hope you get it sorted, any questions just ask and I'll do my best.

*EDIT* Just realized you also said no HDD which means you won't be able to put a bootloader on it as this is saved to the HDD. You will just have to run the live distro without installing.

 

[barrydrake]

To be honest, this sounds like as massive hardware failure. Can you get into the BIOS or UEFI settings on boot up? This will tell you what the BIOS is seeing by way of hardware and will help you diasgnose. The problem does not seem to me to have anyuthing to do with Windows or Linux. If you do manage to get a Linux live distro to boot from a USB device, you can run diagnostics, but to do that you will need to get into the BIOS settings firat and can probably find th problem in there - especially the HDD problem.