Loading OS on laptop with dead CD drive

[ZowieHowie]

One of my friends needs me to load Win2k on his laptop. He reformatted the harddrive, and went to load it from CD, but the CD drive seems to have died. Here is what I have done so far:

I hooked up the external parallel port CD drive, and loaded the DOS drivers. The drive was found in DOS, but it would not allow me to load Win2k from DOS though, so I ended up putting WinME (gasp) on the machine. It loaded pretty easliy, though it was quite slow.

Since he wants Win2k on this machine, I thought the best way to do so woudl be to upgrade from the WinME environment. I put the 2K CD in the drive, told it I wanted to upgrade. It copied some files and then restarted the laptop. It started to load Win2k, but then says that it cannot find the disk and to insert it into the drive. The disk was already in the drive, and it seems that since Win2k will not load in Dos, I may be back to square one.


Any advice on how to get Win2k on this laptop?

 

[compso]

copy i386 folder from cd to drive and run winnt32.exe if I remember correctly.

 

[montag451]

try cleaning the cd - wipe it with your tshirt [clean on this morning i presume] from the middle outwards. NOT round and round

 

[Uncle Bob]

what compso said..........

 

[ZowieHowie]

Originally posted by: compso
copy i386 folder from cd to drive and run winnt32.exe if I remember correctly.

How would I go about doing that? Would I do that in DOS?

I tried to do that initially. I think I did a copy e:\*.* c:\ but all it did was copy like 5 files from the CD to the harddrive. It did not copy any of the main files and such. How would I go about having it copy the entire CD to the drive?

Also, WOuld I run winnt32.exe from DOS?

 

[montag451]

ensure that you have 'xcopy' on your floppy. Can download it - just do a search.

use xcopy xxxxxxxx /s [i think it is s] to copy all subdirectories in xxxxxxxx folder

 

[compso]

Run XCOPY and winnt32 from DOS.

 

[ZowieHowie]

Originally posted by: compso
Run XCOPY and winnt32 from DOS.

I can't find winnt32. Where would it be located, and what would I type in at the c: to get into the folder that it is in?

 

[ZowieHowie]

Okay.... I was able to access winnt32.exe. It was in the i386 folder.

I tried to run it, and it said that it cannot be run in MSDos Mode. Any other ideas on what I should do?

 

[compso]

try setup.exe if there is one in the I386 folder, but from my past experiences, I thought winnt32.exe was the one to run for Windows 2000 Pro and setup.exe was for Win9x. Maybe someone will clarify this...

 

[montag451]

there should be a setup file in the root directory of the cd.
I think it would be winnt32.exe, bur it you find setup.exe, then go for it.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Make the 4 BOOT DISKS located on the CD in the MakeBoot directory and
you should be good to go.

Remember to load the External CD drive drivers (BackPack?)

At the prompt ""Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" screen, press the F6,
then 'S' to to specify the device driver.