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Installing Windows Over a Network

F

FreakyT

n00b
Joined
Jun 20, 2004
Messages
46
Hey all,

I just bought a weird old tablet pc without an OS. It also has no removable storage, and predates USB booting.

I've heard that the problem can be solved by installing the OS over a network, but I'm still not quite sure how to do that (most of the directions I found on the internet seemed to require booting your target device from a floppy disk).

So, does anyone know the best way to install windows (I'm planning on installing Windows 2000) completely over a network?

Thanks!
 
If it is one of the older ones, like an old Compaq I set up for someone a few years ago, the only real option you have is to use an external optical drive....and if it predates USB booting (most tablets should boot from USB), then it is probably a tablet with a proprietary connector for an external optical drive.
 
I'd pull the hard drive out, attach it to a desktop, format a small portion of it (a few gigs) with FAT32, then create a second partition of roughly equal size (you don't have to use the entire capacity for this, that's not the point), and then format it FAT32 also. Use a 98SE boot disk (or a WinME one, get one from www.bootdisk.com if necessary) and transfer the system files off to that drive making it bootable. Find smartdrv.exe someplace, you'll need it.

After making the disc bootable, copy all the files off that floppy to the C:\ partition, along with smartdrv.exe. On the second partition you created/formatted, copy the i386 folder off the Win2K CD.

Put the hard drive back in the laptop, power up, at the menu to choose hard drive or CD boot, press Shift+F5 to get directly to a Command Prompt, run smartdrv.exe, run it a second time so it shows you the status to make sure it's loaded. If so, CD to D:\i386 and run winnt.exe and roll with it...

In my experience, while this seems like a far more complicated process, it's easier than doing a network installation - at least to me. Network installs never seem to turn out right...

After it's up and running, you can delete the second partition if you want and then use some tool like Parted Magic to expand the single partition to the full capacity of the hard drive, etc.
 
I just reinstalled my boss's old IBM Thinkpad 240 last week. It also predated bootable USB and lacks optical drives and floppy drives. It also doesn't have an RJ45 port nor wireless (but I did have a PCMCIA 10/100 Linksys card for it).

What I did was pull out the harddrive and put it in a newer Thinkpad and copy the contents of the Windows 98SE CD and all of the drivers into a folder, then I made that drive bootable.

Then I put the drive back into the Thinkpad 240 and booted it up and ran the Windows 98SE setup from the drive.

It went smoothly.
 
See, that method is fine for any 9x-based version of Windows, but not for any NT-based version (NT4, 2K, XP, 2K3, Vista, 2K8, etc) because the NT-based versions require a separate partition. You can't have the installation files on the same partition that you intend to install from as it'll complain during the initial phase of the setup about the source and target being the same location.

Same principle, pretty much... ;)
 
Joe Average said:
I'd pull the hard drive out, attach it to a desktop, format a small portion of it (a few gigs) with FAT32, then create a second partition of roughly equal size (you don't have to use the entire capacity for this, that's not the point), and then format it FAT32 also.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't that mean that I'd be stuck with a FAT32 formatted Windows 2000 installation, though?

EDIT: Wait, nevermind, these Microsoft KB articles http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307848/ and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881 say that you can convert to NTFS later.

I'll have to try that method later today.
 
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Once you're fully situated with the drive the way you want, the command (from a Command Prompt) is:

convert <driveletter>: /fs:ntfs

That's about it... take a few minutes (especially on that older machine) and a reboot afterwards is a good idea - it's not required, but a good idea regardless. Also, a chkdsk <driveletter>: /f can't hurt also, it will require a reboot to complete however.

After that you'll have everything squared away. Simple. :D
 
Joe Average said:
See, that method is fine for any 9x-based version of Windows, but not for any NT-based version (NT4, 2K, XP, 2K3, Vista, 2K8, etc) because the NT-based versions require a separate partition. You can't have the installation files on the same partition that you intend to install from as it'll complain during the initial phase of the setup about the source and target being the same location.

Same principle, pretty much... ;)
Click to expand...

Yup. She had Win2000 on it before. It was pathetically slow and unusable. I told her whoever she gave it to to have it installed before, never take it there again. The x240 only had 64mb of RAM and a Celeron 266mhz processor (I think).

I tried to reinstall Win2k using the same method (on a second partition as you've mentioned), and when it booted into Windows, everything. took. forever. to. do. anything. Ugh.

So I offered her my old copy of 98SE I had at home collecting dust.
 
OK, so I transferred the system files to the drive, but it still won't boot...I consistently get the message "Remove disks or other media and press any key to restart". Searching for that yields things saying I'm missing boot files...but I copied every file (from this website http://www.allbootdisks.com/disk_contents/download/98.html) to the disk, and marked the partition as "active" in the windows disk management program.

Any ideas, or am I going to have to figure out how to netboot it after all?
 
You need to format the partition using format <driveletter>: /s

That's how you get the system files transferred from the CD (if that's what you're using, and you must boot from that CD to get it to recognize the system files in the first place). You can't just copy the files over, that doesn't work.

Move the hard drive over as mentioned before (no idea how you did it, but do it again, it needs to be attached to the machine you're actually booting with that CD - and no you can't do it with a USB attachment either, it must be hardwired into one of the IDE controllers on the machine. Once you boot off the CD, use fdisk to create your partition(s), make the first one on the drive Active (it'll bitch that you must make it or one of them Active), then reboot off the CD again to make that change.

Once you've got the partition(s) set up and ready to roll, change to the root directory of the CD, use the format <driveletter>: /s and it'll format the drive and do the system file transfer from CD to the hard drive.

The system files are marker files, especially the io.sys and msdos.sys files - they are hidden system files and need to be handled that way. When you're done, the only visible file will be command.com as the other two are hidden.

At that point you can copy the rest of the files to that partition, and do the steps I outlined above.

But again, just copying io.sys, msdos.sys, and command.com as well as the other files doesn't make that drive bootable - that's why you're getting that error. When the POST is complete, it'll look for those hidden system files that have to be placed by the format command using the /s switch - it means transfer the system files to the freshly formatted partition.

Good luck...

(and yes, I've done this like 95,000 times in my career... it's a curse...) :D
 
Okay....you've completely lost me...:(

Joe Average said:
You need to format the partition using format <driveletter>: /s
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure the /s option hasn't been around since Windows ME; it's definitly not in 7, Vista, or XP, since I just tried them all. Unless you're referring to a 98/ME startup disk, which isn't really an option either since I don't know where I would even buy a floppy disk anymore....

Move the hard drive over as mentioned before (no idea how you did it, but do it again, it needs to be attached to the machine you're actually booting with that CD - and no you can't do it with a USB attachment either, it must be hardwired into one of the IDE controllers on the machine (...)
Click to expand...

I can connect the HD to one of two things: the tablet, with IDE, and my desktop, with a USB enclosure. I can't connect it with IDE to the desktop directly since it's a smaller laptop drive and I don't have the requisite adapter.

Once you've got the partition(s) set up and ready to roll, change to the root directory of the CD, use the format <driveletter>: /s and it'll format the drive and do the system file transfer from CD to the hard drive.
Click to expand...

I set up the partitions with Windows's compmgmt.msc via the USB connection...is that method incorrect?

Sorry if I'm being completely dense here, but this sure is a lot harder than back when I used to do Win98 installs this way :cool:
 
The basic gist is: unless you get some way of transferring the boot system files onto that hard drive, you're not going to get far with this hard drive swap method.

If you can't locate a floppy - which you could use for the network boot and installation initialization - there's no way to do a network installation on that machine that I'm aware of.

Let's try this the most simplistic way of all:

Is there an OS on it already, and if so, is it functional?

Answer that with the details and we'll move to the next step... and yes I know you said it has no OS, but humor me... the hard drive is absolutely bare clean with nada on it, yes?
 
Most simplistic way of all? Sounds good to me :)

And nope, there's no OS of any kind on the drive, it's completely blank except for the stuff I just put on it, which I can easily remove.
 
Ok, then to make it as simple as possible:

You can't get any OS on that drive unless you:

a) make it bootable so you can boot the laptop off the hard drive in order to run the installation program for the OS you're interested in, or...

b) make it bootable so it can load a NIC driver to access the installation files across the network.

But you probably already understand this. If you don't have access to a 98/98SE or WinME CD, or heaven forbid even a Windows 95 CD, you're basically going to be dead in the water from this point on.

Can you give me a brand and model number of that "tablet" so I can do some research? See, with Windows all this shit is a nightmare because of how it works. If this was Linux it would be easy: yank the hard drive out, install Linux on that drive using another machine, pull the drive out, stick it in, boot and you're done. But Windows don't work quite that easily, especially with needing drivers to be loaded based on the detection routines during the installation... bleh.
 
That's what I figured -- right now, I'm trying using a utility for making USB drives bootable, to see if that works.

If that doesn't, though, it's a Fujitsu Stylistic LT C-500.

By the way, thanks for all the quick replies!

EDIT: Ah ha! It worked -- now I can boot a Windows 98 DOS prompt. In theory, I should be able to copy that i386 folder now....
 
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Uhmmm... so... that tablet is booting off a USB stick? I thought it was established that it wouldn't do that... ;)

I've seen thousands of those old tablets on eBay for like $125, thought about getting one as an eBook reader but the battery life of those old machines is absolutely atrocious... ugh.

If you have a USB stick or drive it can boot from, just copy the i386 folder to that drive (if it's large enough, I think the Win2K installation files are under 400MB total in that directory) and boot off the drive to do the installation. Boot off it and then get into the i386 directory and run winnt.exe.

BEST TIP I CAN OFFER: You desperately need to locate smartdrv.exe and use it, seriously. If you don't the installation could take hours and I'm not kidding. Windows 2000 will even alert you ahead of time that if you're attempting the installation without smartdrv.exe being loaded beforehand, the install will... of course... take a very very long time, and it does, especially if you're doing this from a USB device because that old tablet is most certainly USB 1.0, well under a megabyte per second.

Bleh... you'll figure it out. When you get it running, have fun with it. ;)
 
Joe Average said:
Uhmmm... so... that tablet is booting off a USB stick? I thought it was established that it wouldn't do that... ;)
Click to expand...

Ah, no, the tablet is still booting off its internal HD...I just used a "Make your USB stick bootable" tutorial (specifically, this one: http://www.thepcspy.com/read/bootable_usb_flash_drive) to make the tablet's HD bootable. (The drive was in a USB enclosure, connected to my laptop.) Once I did that, I used gParted on Linux to mess around with the drive's partitions. Now, it (seems) to be installing.

Hopefully that information comes in handy to someone in the future (though I doubt it), and thanks again for your help!
 
Ah, gotcha... just remember you're gonna need the drivers for touch capability too, but I'm sure you have that covered as well. Fujitsu does a pretty good job of covering all the necessary drivers at their website.
 
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