Installing windows on a laptop without cd-rom, floppy?

[picardal]

So I purchased a laptop on ebay: Big mistake... lol

When I received it, it was password protected! So I had to take it apart, hold a screwdriver on the cmos pins to reset it and put the laptop back together. Voila -- password free.
2nd thing I noticed, no drives whatsoever were included so now im stuck since i dont know how to go about installing windows.



How do I do this? I have a wireless nic somewhere-- Would I be able to do it that way but I dont have an option in my laptop to boot from a network
My laptop is a fujitsu p2 366 L470
Also, my bios wont let me boot from a usb device.
It gives me floppy, cd-rom, or hd as options --- All of these which are included in a docking station which I dont have .
Any ideas?


I do have a usb cd-rom but... I have a feeling i need a floppy drive to install drivers(i have no idea where to get these) so that my lappy will recognize it!
Would I be able to boot off of a pcmcia cd-rom?

Any help would be greatly appreciated
thx guys
ALain

 

[zodder]

I assume you are trying to install Win XP? Do a search on how to slipstream drivers and SP2 into a Win XP install disk. You should be good to go if you follow the instructions. Assuming that you can boot from a USB device on your laptop.

 

[thermalpaste]

Simple, get yourself a win-98 boot disk, start with the CD-ROM support option. Put the win-xp cd, goto the i386 directory and run winnt.exe

 

[thermalpaste]

ooops, did you say that you do not havva floppy drive? Try borrowing a USB FDD and make the FDD your first boots device through your BIOS setup.

I assume you are trying to install Win XP? Do a search on how to slipstream drivers and SP2 into a Win XP install disk. You should be good to go if you follow the instructions. Assuming that you can boot from a USB device on your laptop.

You may also wanna try this, its complicated though.....

 

[biostud]

Try the USB CD drive, I can choose boot from USB device in my laptop's BIOS.

 

[picardal]

Yeah my bios wont let me boot off of a usb drive
It gives me floppy, cd-rom, or hd as options --- All of these which are included in a docking station which I dont have .

 

[Gurck]

No idea about the connectors on laptop hdd's, can you access it from another pc, ie. as a slave drive?

 

[picardal]

Originally posted by: Gurck
No idea about the connectors on laptop hdd's, can you access it from another pc, ie. as a slave drive?

My guess is yes but i would need a special adapter for it.

 

[sirfergy]

Yes, you would need a special adapter for it. Fry's sells them for like $20 bucks.

 

[picardal]

Why would i want to do that though --- i have tried installing windows on one system and then transferring it onto another and the results are always awful... Is there a better way to do this?

 

[Gurck]

Originally posted by: picardal
Why would i want to do that though --- i have tried installing windows on one system and then transferring it onto another and the results are always awful... Is there a better way to do this?

If you can do that, you could put an old copy of dos on the drive and copy the files over to it from your windows CD, then boot into dos and install windows from the hdd in dos - run the ... I think winnt.exe file in the i386 folder.

 

[MDE]

Originally posted by: Gurck

Originally posted by: picardal
Why would i want to do that though --- i have tried installing windows on one system and then transferring it onto another and the results are always awful... Is there a better way to do this?

If you can do that, you could put an old copy of dos on the drive and copy the files over to it from your windows CD, then boot into dos and install windows from the hdd in dos - run the ... I think winnt.exe file in the i386 folder.

IIRC, a Windows XP\2000 install won't run from DOS.

 

[picardal]

i was thinking the same thing, i think i tried it a while ago...

 

[redbeard1]

The only way, without buying the needed cdrom, is to get the laptop drive to ide adapter, format the hard drive in another system, get it so it is bootable (usually I use 98 boot files), copy the OS files to the hard drive (the win98 folder on that cd, the I386 folder on 2000/xp) and then let it boot to a command prompt. Then move to the os folder and run setup.exe for 98, or winnt.exe for 2000/xp.

 

[dcdomain]

It should run from Dos if you run Winnt.exe from within the i386 folder.

I had to install an OS on a laptop without an optical drive many times, but I always had a floppy drive to boot up with into Dos (Win98SE boot disk or WinME boot disk). You can get an adapter for a laptop harddrive that will allow you to install it in your desktop, or swap it into another laptop with an optical drive.

Copy the i386 folder, then move the harddrive back into the laptop and... I guess you are on your own in trying to figure out how to boot up into Dos without a floppy. Can you have the Dos files copied onto the harddrive, will it boot into Dos like that?

 

[picardal]

thx guys --- I found myself an adapter ---
I understand transferring the windows files as well.
I am really a novice when it comes to dos and I have no idea what to do --- Does anybody know what dos files I need to be able to boot off of my hd? I could make a boot disk in windows xp but I have no floppy
Alain

 

[Gurck]

you can get bootdisks from bootdisk.com

 

[moonsite]

To get the hard drive to be bootable, if you use a win98 bootup floppy, just format the C drive with the command 'format c: /s' , without the quote. That will make the hard drive bootable. Then you can copy the files over for installation. You don't need to copy any dos file into C drive. This is the step I would do.

Plug into another computer as the only drive.
boot from a win98 or winme bootdisk
run the format c: /s command and turn off after it is done.
(you can also use dos xcopy command to copy , but it would take a long time. So I prefer to do the copying in windows instead.) So then I ....
plug the old drive back in and make this laptop drive a slave
bootup your original system and start copy files to laptop hard drive for installation

So now when you plug the laptop drive back into the laptop and start up, it will boot to a command prompt. You can just type
'cd directory-name' where cd is the command for change directory, and directory is the name of the folder your setup file is in, and then just do what DCDOMAIN said.

 

[dcdomain]

Sweet... just what I needed for a friend's laptop.