Installing Windows on Laptop with no Floppy Drive (1 Viewer)

[Kenneth Cummings]

Hello, I just recently purchased a used laptop off of ebay, and it runs well except it has no operating system installed. But I am wondering if I need a floppy drive to install Windows. I haven't bought a Window operating system yet, but I don't really want to get XP, because this is a older laptop (Toshiba Tecra 8000) that can run it, but would need to get ram boosted soon. Can I run Windwos 98SE without a floppy disk or could I put the boot infomation on a CD-RW instead?

By the way, do CD-R/CD-RW work at all during DOS for a laptop?

 

[Tekara]

Hello,

Windows 98SE should be a bootable CD, it should give you the option of booting into the installation or booting into the command line (DOS).

CD-R's and CD-RWs will work just fine in DOS, most should operate as a standard cdrom with the default drivers that the win98 bootdisk loads.

 

[Tekara]

Oh, since the thought came up, you may want to consider using Linux. It's a faster and heartier than windows and since this sounds like it will be a secondary computer, it may give you a good chance to learn it.

I know it sounds a bit intimidating, but if you just take your time it's actually not too bad at all.

Some reccomendations:

yoper
vectorlinux SOHO

if your looking for more fully featured:

gentoo (a bit painful to install, but portage is the best for installing new applications)
debian (debians apt-get is still one of the best for getting new software with little hassle)

 

[Jeff Blair]

If you want to use Windows, you can always make a Win98 boot CD. You can use Nero for that. If you are going to be putting on 2000 or XP, then the CD is bootable. As for Linux, I think it is a good choice, but then again I am a little swayed. I have 3 PC's running it at home.
Rob,
I am running Gentoo, and I like portage for installing all the software. Nice and easy. But, yes it can be a little scary installing it for the first time. And, it takes a while.

 

[Tekara]

Yeah, my home server runs off gentoo, even though it's touted as not being for newbies I find that portage is perfect for newbies. It handles all the dependencies and does everything for you.

They have a great guide for walking you through the installation. So even though it's time consuming, you always know what's up.

Hopefully this summer I can take some time to move my laptop over to gentoo as well. I surely won't miss windows .

 

[Kenneth Cummings]

Well Jeff, I already made a bootcd shortly before your post and got it working on the laptop. I managed to use the dos commands that were generated by the setup to format the hard-drive, as it wasn't properly erased (hard-drive was from another laptop that had a conflicting operating system then the one that was on the laptop, causing a lockdown with the message "Error loading operating system).

That message above is gone now, and I can access dos at any time, even so I have no idea how to acually use it. I already ordered a copy of Windows 98SE to put on the computer, which should arrive by the end of the week, and with the bootdisk cd, I should have no problems. Thanks you guys.

P.S. Does anyone know what the cd-rom drive letter is for the Tecra in dos. Just incase I need to run the cd first before installing Windows 98SE.

By the way, I didn't mind the suggestion for Linux, but sadly I wouldn't have much gaming support with it.

 

[Jeff Blair]

Ken, good to hear that you have it up and running. As for the CDROM letter, you should see it pop up while it is booting. If you are still having problems formating the HDD, then you can do what they call a debug wipe. You use debug to go in and wipe the drive clean. And, I do mean clean. You can go here to find out how.

Debug Script

As for games, ya, Linux isn't that great right now for them, but it is getting better. Also, some of the game people are making versions for Linux.

Rob, I have one of mine running as a Mail/FTP/HTTP server. I'm about to install MythTV on it as well for a back end server for that. Poor little thing. It's only a Dell GX1 P3-550.

 

[nolesrule]

Generally, it'll be drive D: if you only have one partition on the hard drive.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

A Tecra 8000 can't run games anyway... it has an ancient Pentium CPU and no RAM.

 

[Kenneth Cummings]

Well the laptop has Windows 98SE installed and working great(after some hiccups with monitor, which was fixed by Toshiba's driver downloads). Now I just need a modem card to use the cable modem this house has, instead of having to use CD-RWs to transer downloads between computers).