I have tried the Ultimate Boot CD, via USB, and it can not even detect the hard drive in there to re-partition.
I connected an external CD drive to try and load XP Pro SP3 slipstream CD I made ages ago. It started to load and sees a hard drive of 350G, but then crashes with BSOD.
At the moment, I got a nonworking laptop!
I keep trying to find a way to get some sort of Windows on it. All I have are my floppies of 3.1 and 95. XP Pro CD, Vista Upgrade, and the W10 Home files after the laptop was registered with it on install.