The issue is my laptop is by no means a standard. Its actually not a laptop but an intel itanium portable reference board without an IDE connector and i don't have any SATA optical drives sitting around. The thing is a lot like a sun
ultra 3 mobile worksation. My system is running windows server 2008 for IA64. Not many live cds i know of support my hardware let alone have drivers for the USB to IDE device i have.