Loading Windows onto a laptop with no CD Rom drive

[ZowieHowie]

I have an old laptop (Compaq LTE Elite DX4-75). I would like to load Windows95 or 98 on it. It does not have a CD drive. A friend of mine told me that it can be done through a network. Anyone have any idea on how I would go about doing this?

 

[AmigaMan]

If you have a network connection established, you can copy over the .CAB files to your hard drive and start the install from the HD instead of the CD. If you don't then you can copy the .CAB files to a floppy (one floppy will hold one .CAB files and I think there are around 15 or so for Win95). Then you can boot from a floppy bootdisk and start the install from a floppy.

 

[ZowieHowie]

How would I go about doing this? I am kinda lost. I see that there are CAB files, but how do I extract them onto the harddrive. Also, you say a bootable floppy. What files have to be on it so that it is bootable? I have no idea how do to this :-/.

 

[ProviaFan]

First, you'd need to make a DOS boot floppy with basic utilities on it (like FDISK, to partition the hard disk, and FORMAT to format it). I believe you can find such a beast at bootdisk.com. Then, after formatting the hard disk, you can use the floppies to copy the CAB files onto the laptop's hard disk. I'm not familiar with the Windows 95 setup process, but I'd assume you need to copy some kind of setup.exe file as well; I'm just not sure where you'd find it on the Windows 95 CD.