Ok Im hoping that someone will be able to help me with this:

I have a Toshiba Satellite 1905. The problem started with some viruses on the laptop I downloaded and installed AVG and ran it. During the scan the computer shutdown and will get to the Windows Screen and restart.

My cdrom drive does not have the little black piece in the center to keep the cd in place so I cant put the 3 recovery cds in the drive and recover the computer.

I found a tutorial online for installing windows xp on a laptop drive using a desktop computer, but that wont help because I only have the recovery cds. Im not sure if my external cdrom will work, but I am pretty sure it wont. What do I do?

What about a bootable thumb drive?

I havent tried it, but this is a fairly old computer and I am pretty sure that it will not boot to usb.

You could try using a external USB CD ROM... but you might have the same problem as the thumb drive

Yeah thats what I thought. Its has a floppy drive though is there a way to boot from that (I know there probably is)?

:P This is seriously just a shot in the dark, so forgive my ignorance. Is there an adapter that will allow you to connect the USB drive as whatever interface your internal CD-ROM uses?

I think your best option is to disassemble the laptop and replace the whole drive.

Dont assum just give it a try


Good luck