Installing an OS on a crippled laptop

[USSEnterprise]

I need to install at least Windows 95 on a Toshiba Protege 3440CT. I have Windows 95 and 98SE full versions on CDs. I do not have a CD-ROM drive on the laptop. There is a CD-ROM drive, but it is on a proprietary PCMCIA card, which DOS will not see, because Toshiba never released a DOS compatible driver. Right now, all I have on it is DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 (installed from a USB floppy drive). I know W95 came as a 25 FD set as well. Is there any way I can make of these sets with my CD? The last thing I'm considering is buying an adapter and popping the laptop's hard disk into a desktop PC, but then I will have driver conflicts coming out the wazoo. Any suggestions?

[AtomSmasher]

First thing, if you think you take the hardrive out, use an adapater, and install win 95 on it, it will not work on the laptop, you'll get blue screens of death every time you boot. 

The best thing to do is to boot from the cd if possible.  Are there any options in the bios to boot from cd? or boot from pcmcia device?  I don't have much experience with laptops so I'm just guessing on possible options you may have.

If you can't do that, then booting from a win 95 or win 98 startup disk is probably your best option.  You can get images of the disks here: http://www.bootdisk.com/  which you put onto a floppy and boot from the floppy.  Theres a lot of information on installing onto older machines on that site so check it out and see if you can find something to help you.  If not, let us know and maybe someone else can give a better suggestion.

[SOAPboy]

Network install..

only option thats worth a crap imo.. or find a replacement drive off ebay..

[DrewKaree]

Well, you said you threw something on there off of a USB floppy drive, how about throwing on a USB CD drive?  Perhaps a USB key if you need the drivers for that USB CD drive?

[USSEnterprise]

The BIOS will only support a floppy boot from the USB port. The problem is that DOS does not see the PCMCIA slot built into the motherboard, and Toshiba makes no DOS drivers for the slot. I cannot use anything that uses PCMCIA. Additionally, Toshiba made no DOS drivers for the built in NIC or the modem. The only resort I can think of involves a null modem and a few days of extreme patience...

[SOAPboy]

The BIOS will only support a floppy boot from the USB port. The problem is that DOS does not see the PCMCIA slot built into the motherboard, and Toshiba makes no DOS drivers for the slot. I cannot use anything that uses PCMCIA. Additionally, Toshiba made no DOS drivers for the built in NIC or the modem. The only resort I can think of involves a null modem and a few days of extreme patience...

Dont need drivers for dos for the nic if your doing network installs.. well.. if its not pxi compliant you will.. but stiull, give it a shot

[DrewKaree]

The BIOS will only support a floppy boot from the USB port. The problem is that DOS does not see the PCMCIA slot built into the motherboard, and Toshiba makes no DOS drivers for the slot. I cannot use anything that uses PCMCIA. Additionally, Toshiba made no DOS drivers for the built in NIC or the modem. The only resort I can think of involves a null modem and a few days of extreme patience...

What about copying your disk onto your hard drive via the USB CD drive and then running the install from your hard drive?  You said you've got DOS on there, yes?  fdisk and stick the files on another partition.

What is the information on your Toshiba card?  Mebbe someone out there knows of where to find the driver info or a driver that'll work for your purposes.

[USSEnterprise]

Its not the card thats the problem. Apparently, Toshiba used their own special configuration with all the PCMCIA slots in their laptops. A generic PC card driver will not work. They only ever released drivers for Windows 98 and Windows 2000.

[NinjaEpisode]

For all the effort, it'll be easier to yank the HD, find an adapter, leave DOS intact on the HD, copy the CD to the HD in a separate directory, and go from there...

[Grasshopper]

It is actually possible to transfer Windows to floppy disks using dos commands but it's a tremendous hassle.

First you need to copy the entire contents of the windows cd to harddisk.

I'll assume you've copied all the files including subdirectories to c:\wintemp

Now put the first blank floppy in the a: drive and execute the following commands from a dos shell.

attrib +a c:\wintemp\*.* /s /d

xcopy c:\wintemp\*.* a:\ /m /e

Once the floppy disk is full you'll get an error message. Now put in floppy number two and execute the xcopy command again. Wait for the error message and put in disk number three etc. keep doing this until all the files have been copied.

For details of how this works type help attrib and help xcopy at the command prompt.

[NinjaEpisode]

Just orderd one of these myself to take care of two old Compaq 5200's that I acquired.  I'll let you know how it works out.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6846569818

[captainpotato]

I'd also go the way that DrewKaree suggests. That's how I put Damn Small Linux on my Libretto 110, which has the same proprietary PCMCIA rubbish as your machine (and I don't have a CDROM for it either...). Just plug the laptop drive in with an adapter, copy over the CD to a second partition and install from there. Couldn't be easier.