Question for Linux people
- Thread starter mjdted
- Start date
I second this suggestion.
Yes it does, but it won't boot at all from the cd drive no matter what options are set in the bios, and there is no floppy drive, just one working usb port. It has Ubuntu installed on it which was installed from another pc. I want to install windows 95 or 98 on it (to run some old software) but windows won't accept being shifted from one set of hardware to another. I'll give the usb flash drive suggestion a try (would that work with an old OS?)
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you could get a 2.5 to 3.5 hdd adaptor about $5
put it in your other pc (disconect original hdd just to be safe) boot from dos floppy format hdd, install dos on it (the laptop hdd that is), turn off pc connect original hdd, boot back into windows copy windows cd to a folder on the laptop hdd (dont call it windows)
put drive back into laptop boot into dos go to cd folder run setup.exe
put it in your other pc (disconect original hdd just to be safe) boot from dos floppy format hdd, install dos on it (the laptop hdd that is), turn off pc connect original hdd, boot back into windows copy windows cd to a folder on the laptop hdd (dont call it windows)
put drive back into laptop boot into dos go to cd folder run setup.exe
For somewhat old(9-12 months) hardware, it rarely has any trouble.
Well, this laptop is a pentium III 700 so as you can guess it's not "new" hardware.
Blazkowicz
Legend
you can make a usb flash drive DOS bootable, with a tool from HP : HP USB Disk Storage Tool. It includes the basic DOS files from win98 (so, compatible with fat32). so your procedure works with usb instead of floppy, I did it to put a DOS on a old HDD to make a games jukebox with an old pentium.
Note that booting from usb is not very old, PCs older than 5 or 6 years can't do it.
That laptop probably can't boot from usb at all.
Blazkowicz
Legend
If the laptop does network boot (PXE), it's a great way to install a linux flavor. You can get the network boot variants of the net-installs of debian and ubuntu, and probably other distros. You need a master PC off course and a linux based one lends naturally to that role, but it's possible with windows as well I think, the needed components are a dhcp server and a tftp server.
now I think of it, it's even possible to boot a DOS image from network!
two googled links on doing that.
http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/ http://www.terryburton.co.uk/blog/2007/08/pxe-boot-freedos-with-memdisk-to-flash.html
it may be interesting to try usb frankendrivers that may or not allow you to use the usb cdrom from DOS!
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
they could be copied into the DOS boot image if you got into that fluff.
(wow.. the DOS boot image from the first links looks seriously cool, with network and samba support. I'll look more into it, it may allow me to deploy my DOS games to every network bootable PC! and you can make any junk PC net bootable with the right NIC. or by managing to bake a bootrom)
last thing : don't hesitate to try virtualbox, even if your laptop is short on ram you may be able to run win95 with around 32MB of dedicated ram and get something useful from it.
now I think of it, it's even possible to boot a DOS image from network!
two googled links on doing that.
http://home.allegiance.tv/~joem298/ http://www.terryburton.co.uk/blog/2007/08/pxe-boot-freedos-with-memdisk-to-flash.html
it may be interesting to try usb frankendrivers that may or not allow you to use the usb cdrom from DOS!
http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
they could be copied into the DOS boot image if you got into that fluff.
(wow.. the DOS boot image from the first links looks seriously cool, with network and samba support. I'll look more into it, it may allow me to deploy my DOS games to every network bootable PC! and you can make any junk PC net bootable with the right NIC. or by managing to bake a bootrom)
last thing : don't hesitate to try virtualbox, even if your laptop is short on ram you may be able to run win95 with around 32MB of dedicated ram and get something useful from it.
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Thanks. Virtualbox sounds very interesting. I use Virtualpc but I didn't know there was a linux equivalent out there. That would be great if I could run win95 inside linux, it'd save a lot of hassle.
edit: on 2nd thoughts I'll try and give the network boot a go. If I can get DOS onto the hdd it shouldn't be too difficult from there.
edit: on 2nd thoughts I'll try and give the network boot a go. If I can get DOS onto the hdd it shouldn't be too difficult from there.
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Just got around to doing this, and boy did I have to jump through some hoops to get it working. None of the network support disks (like Bart's network disk) would boot through the network on my laptop, and neither did any of the dos usb drivers (and I tried every combination). I ended up just copying the winows 98 onto the hdd manually and then using the network boot to boot a windows 98 startup disk and using that to install windows.
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