Loking for a set of floppies to install an Os

jackofalltrades

jackofalltrades

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Feb 7, 2006
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I am looking to install an Os on a laptop that hasn't got a cdrom anyone know where to get a cheap Os on floppies? system is a 233mhz lappy I am only interested in getting a graphical system up and running to test the laptop.
 
well you could always check ebay for some windows 3.1 floppies.

I just did a quick google for "os on a floppy" and the first thing i found was MenuetOS. http://www.menuetos.net/ It can be apparently run from a floppy disk. 32-bit D/L -> http://www.menuetos.org/stuff32.htm obviously you'll want the diskette image.
I have never used it, bit it may be worth a try
 
Get a dos boot disk from www.bootdisk.com

FDISK, format C: & sys c: you now have a drive that can boot to MS-DOS.

Place that hard drive in another machine, copy the relevant Windows files to the drive e.g. to c:\install

Now return the hard drive boot to dos and run the windows installer. For Windows 2000 / XP you need to run winnt.exe for Windows 95/98/ME (or 3.11 for that matter) you run setup.exe
 
Go grab an external USB drive caddy with an IDE connection. Hook that up to a CD drive instead of a hard drive, and you can install Windows/Linux/whateveryouwant on there. I recently did it with an old 12" Thinkpad - works a treat.
 
If you don't mind win 95/98. You can remove the hd and put it into another pc, make 2 partitions, the first one all but a gig and the second a 1 gig partition, format with fat16 or fat32, copy the contents of the win95/98 cd into the 1gig partition. Then just put the drive back in the lappy and boot from a win95/98 boot disk and install.

I had to reinstall Win9x fairly frequently back in the day. So I left a partition with Win98SE on it all the time. It made installing the os go by a bit quicker, and you never get the "insert win98 disk" during installs of various hardware and software like you did when installed from cd. It just defaulted to looking for whatever it needed from the drive the os was installed from.

Why did win98 need you to insert the cd when you installed a printer, or upgraded vid card drivers, or anything else? Obviously it was to get certain files, but why those files were not installed with the os beats me.
 
Windows XP does the same thing if you clean up the installer cache -- or I forgot exactly what it was but my last install of XP I had stripped it down to the minimum and it asked me for the disk when I installed USB mass storage devices, USB HID and even a Lexmark Postscript printer (it uses the standard MS PS Driver)
 
If you have enough space, you can copy the i386 folder off the CD and refer the system to that if it ever wants anything off it.
 
I guess I can use msbackup and use to restore the windows on the laptop. I would just have to copy the restore utility to a floppy. That is if I can't use a usb cdrom.
 
athlon1.2 said:
Place that hard drive in another machine
Click to expand...

that's kinda hard with pre-sata lappy hdd you know

:LJ: said:
Go grab an external USB drive caddy with an IDE connection. Hook that up to a CD drive instead of a hard drive, and you can install Windows/Linux/whateveryouwant on there. I recently did it with an old 12" Thinkpad - works a treat.
Click to expand...

+1
 
The IDE laptop drives are 44 pin and have power. They are pin-compatible with normal IDE drive so all you need is an adapter like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245

I've done the CD-ROM trick with a Mac laptop but on an older PC you might have issues. You will probably need to boot off the internal floppy drive. You would have to create the 4 bootdisks for XP as well.
 
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