• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Have an old laptop with only a FDD...

I

imported_goku

Diamond Member
And I want to install say windows 95 or 98, how would I got about doing this? I've only got the CD versions and I can't find downloadable FDD versions online so... Is there a command I can do with the CD to make it into multiple FDDs? I can't remove the HDD because it's so old that its likely not IDE compatible.
 
If it's at least a 486, then it's an IDE drive. If it's a 386 or earlier then you wouldn't want to be running win95 on it anyhow.
 
You can probably pick up an old school external cdrom that connects to your parallel port. Check on ebay. I can't imagine one of these costing more than a few bucks. Of course, on ebay, you might pay $100 for "shipping". 😉

 
I was wondering about the whole concept of external CD and FDD drives powered by the PCMCIA bus and was wondering if those would even be bootable on a small system or not.
 
Here is my suggestion.

remove the hdd and copy the windows 95 CD to it, in a directory called "WIN95" or something like that. put the hdd back in the laptop and boot from a floppy. install the Windows using the install files found in the WIN95 directory (you'll probbaly just have to go to the WIN95 directory and run setup.exe or something like that.

I have done this with Win98, and I am not sure if it will work with Win95 or not.
 
For an external cd, you would need to have the drivers load from a floppy first, then you should be able to run the install from the cd.

The better way is as mentioned above. Get a laptop drive converter to IDE, as even very old laptop drives still use the same pinouts as newer drives. Then do all your OS prepping in another system, including copying the CAB files to the laptop hard drive, then reinstall it back into the laptop and launch setup from the command prompt.
 
In those older models there a couple of options. The floppy could be a removeable module, which could be interchanged with a cdrom, or they shipped with a factory external cdrom that used a special plug in.

With the external scenario, there would be a boot floppy to start the restore process, and then get the rest of the files from the cdrom.
 
parallel port network with a floppy
load the cabs to the hard drive, I've seen some older laptops and that seemed like the only or best option which is very slow.
 
you could use 7-zip to create a self extracting archive spanned across multiple floppies from the install files (all you need off the cd is the Win95 or Win98 folder). Boot to a floppy, repartition and reformat the harddrive, copy and extract the spanned archive to the harddrive and run setup.exe from the extracted Win95 or Win98 folder.

This will of course take a ton of floppies and therefore a ton of patience.
 
does it have any way of connecting to anything else such as a network card? if so, you might be able to get a boot disk with network drivers, and then copy the installation files to the hard drive over a network connection. without a network card, you can also consider connecting machines via serial port, parallel port, etc.
 
Get a PCMCIA Network Card (Hawking are about $20 or less), so you can connect the Laptop to another computer as a Network.

Get Acronis True Image 9 (you must use ver 9 because it is the version that can ghost files rather than a whole drive).

Ghost the Win98 CD with TrueImage on another computer.

Make Boot up for TruIimage (it amounts to about 6 of them).

With the floppies, and the PCMCAI Card the Laptop would boot TrueImage into the Network and you would be able to recover the content of the CD onto the Laptop?s HD.

Alternatively, you can install Win98 on another computer.

After the installation copy Win98 CABs and the Laptop Win98 drivers (if any) to any directory on the Hard Drive Installation.

Ghost the whole drive with any version of TrueImage to another directory on the same drive.

Prepare the TrueImage Boot floppies. Boot it on the Laptop and ghost the Win98 Installation onto the Laptop.

Since you have the drivers and the Win98 CABs, you probably would be able to tune up Win98 for the Laptop.

:sun:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top