I need some major help!
What me and a buddy are working on is an Itronix XC 6250 (ruggedized laptop). It has no floppy or cd-rom drive. It has a serial port, parallel port, an internal 3 gig HD and 2 PCMCIA slots. We're trying to get Win98SE installed on this thing, but it's been really stubborn up until now..
To boot the thing, you need a PCMCIA device. BIOS loads up and tries to find a boot device on the PCMCIA bus. If it finds something, it boots from that device. If not, it tries to load up from the hard drive.. we're using a CompactFlash PCMCIA adapter to boot up right now, and I've got Windows 98 installed before. The thing is, the CompactFlash drive ends up being drive C: and the hard drive ends up being drive D:. Win98SE sort of works this way, but there's two issues.. 1) you have to boot up with the compactflash in the PCMCIA slot and 2) can't get the PCMCIA drivers to work (they always lock up).. also, we're using a parallel port backpack CD-ROM drive to install the software, and it's worked fine.
I don't think there's any way to specify the boot up drive letter for the compact flash.. I wish you could set it to D: (or even A🙂 but there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. When you boot off of the hard drive it gives a message "Error loading operating system". I'm guessing this is because the hard drive was assigned as drive D: in fdisk.
I'm guessing if we get a PCMCIA floppy or CD-ROm drive then it will probably work better, but I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to go about doing this without having to buy anything..
Another thought is to try Win2k. The thing is you need to create the bootdisks, and I'm not sure how all of this works. Anyone know if I could just create the boot disks and copy all the contents to the compactflash card? Also, anyone know how win2k would run on a P200 with 48mb of EDO memory? Sounds like it would probably be pretty painful, but all this computer has to do is run a LabView program.
Thanks a lot for any help..
indd
What me and a buddy are working on is an Itronix XC 6250 (ruggedized laptop). It has no floppy or cd-rom drive. It has a serial port, parallel port, an internal 3 gig HD and 2 PCMCIA slots. We're trying to get Win98SE installed on this thing, but it's been really stubborn up until now..
To boot the thing, you need a PCMCIA device. BIOS loads up and tries to find a boot device on the PCMCIA bus. If it finds something, it boots from that device. If not, it tries to load up from the hard drive.. we're using a CompactFlash PCMCIA adapter to boot up right now, and I've got Windows 98 installed before. The thing is, the CompactFlash drive ends up being drive C: and the hard drive ends up being drive D:. Win98SE sort of works this way, but there's two issues.. 1) you have to boot up with the compactflash in the PCMCIA slot and 2) can't get the PCMCIA drivers to work (they always lock up).. also, we're using a parallel port backpack CD-ROM drive to install the software, and it's worked fine.
I don't think there's any way to specify the boot up drive letter for the compact flash.. I wish you could set it to D: (or even A🙂 but there doesn't seem to be any way to do this. When you boot off of the hard drive it gives a message "Error loading operating system". I'm guessing this is because the hard drive was assigned as drive D: in fdisk.
I'm guessing if we get a PCMCIA floppy or CD-ROm drive then it will probably work better, but I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas on how to go about doing this without having to buy anything..
Another thought is to try Win2k. The thing is you need to create the bootdisks, and I'm not sure how all of this works. Anyone know if I could just create the boot disks and copy all the contents to the compactflash card? Also, anyone know how win2k would run on a P200 with 48mb of EDO memory? Sounds like it would probably be pretty painful, but all this computer has to do is run a LabView program.
Thanks a lot for any help..
indd
