I have a dell latitude Cpi with a locked bios so it wont boot from cd. I want to install Windows XP so i have taken the hard drive to another laptop and installed Xubuntu.After returning it to my dell laptop and installing SBM to allow grub to boot from CD i placed the xp install disc in the cd drive to boot which it done , the install files copied to the hard drive but on reboot my dell says it cannot find the primary disk, the SBM allows a return to the bios and that also shows that there is no hard drive? Apart from opening the laptop and shorting the bios password is their anything else i can do . I did also try a bios update in xubuntu and on reboot it did say it was trying to update the bios but it didnt work.
If it works doing it that way, why didn't you just install Windows from on the other laptop? If Linux is working fine on the system, you've got yourself a Windows problem, so you're probably in the wrong section. You could try to call Dell customer support, assuming the laptop isn't stolen and you can prove ownership. Shorting the password sounds easy enough, only requires a couple of simple solder points, would have been a lot easier than all the tooling about with the hard drive swapping.
