Ok, here is my quick list of things to do:
1) You need a boot floppy, hopefully from the OS you are planning to install. Lets assume you are installing Win9x or WinME.
2) Put the boot floppy in the floppy drive.
3) Power-on the system, go to the BIOS by hitting the "del" key repeatedly when turning on. Find the settings for Boot startup, or system startup. Make the order of devices floppy, CD-ROM, hard drive, network (you might not have network option). Save the settings and reboot.
4) The system should now come up, and boot off the floppy.
5) Run the command "fdisk". You need to create your hard drive partitions. Depending on the size of the hard drive, if you want multiple OS's etc., you will need to create your partitions.
6) When it askes if you want to enable large hard drive support select "yes"
7) Create new primary DOS partition. If you are just using windows, you might just want to make one partition the size of the entire HD (for performance reasons you might want to make a seperate partition for the swap file, and even possibly one simply to install windows in, but those things get complicated, so I will just explain with a single partition). Make the partition the entire size of your hard drive (it will probably ask you that question, just say yes). Once you have done that, you need to go to the main menu thing again and then select the "Set Active Partition". Once in there, it will show you the partition you just created, select that partition as active. You are now ready to format your hard drive.
8) Exit out of the fdisk program. You may need to reboot (it will tell you if you should do so). Type "format c:" (or whatever your new hard drive letter is, you will be able to "cd" into the drive letter, then do a "dir" command, it will tell you how big the drive is, or if it is not formated, this way you know for certain that is the drive letter you want to use the format command on). Formating can take a while depending on how big the drive is and its speed.
9) Place the window's CD into the CD-ROM. Reboot again, but this time when it asks you what boot options you want to use (something like Win9x without CD-ROM support, Win9x with CD-ROM support, etc.) make sure you select the one with CD-ROM support. Your CD-ROM should be detected if the CD-ROM is in anyway a newer CD-ROM (basically the only CD-ROMS that need to have the CD-ROM drivers loaded for installing the OS are ones that were made several years ago, and I am talking back in the days of the state of the art CD-ROM was 4x). Type "cd d:" or whatever your CD-ROM gets placed as. Then type "setup" I believe (it might be install, but I think it is setup). And that should be it. As long as everything else worked properly, i.e. you created the hard drive partition, and formated it, windows should load up.
10) Once windows completes installation, and reboots for the first time, you will then need to load up the drivers for all your hardware (video card, sound card, NIC, modem, motherboard chipset, etc), but all this should be detected by windows and will ask you to specify the drivers, just put in the correct CD-ROM or floppy that the drivers are on for the appropriate hardware, and check the option to search the CD-ROM for the drivers. That should do it. The only drivers that you may have to load that were not auto-detected by Windows would be any drivers or software that may have came with your motherboard.
Hope this quick guidline will help you out.
Facebook
Twitter