Trying to rescue a friends old laptop

G

Granite Gargoyle

Veteran XX
Here' the situation.
The HDD is formatted and it won't boot from the cd rom (it's not an option in the bios) AND only the floppy or the cd rom can be installed at once causing it not to load the cd rom drivers when I use a Win 98 boot disk to get it going. What I need is a way to copy the boot disk to the boot sector of the HDD (I think) so I can leave the cd rom in it and get cd rom support to install Windows. Oh and the damn thing doesn't even have USB either.

If anyone can tell me how to get the bootdisk into the boot sector so that it will boot from there, it would be greatly appreciated. Or even an alternate method.

I know it's old and prolly not worth the effort but it's for a friend and he doesn't have the money for a new one.
Thanks for any help :)
 
You might try to do a network boot. The bios most likely don't support it if you can't boot from a cd so... I would recommend plugging hte hard drive into another computer, but laptops don't use regular ide unless you get a converter. seems like alot of work...
 
Boot with the floppy, it will drop you at the command prompt when the cdrom detection fails.

Format c: /s to format the hard disk and make it bootable. (This will delete all information on it, I assume you know that already).

If you've already formated the hard disk, you can just sys a : c: to make the drive bootable.

You may also need to fdisk /mbr to put a bootstrap on it if the hard drive wasn't initialized.

copy a : c: (or xcopy if you prefer) to copy the contents of the floppy to the hard disk.

Shut down, replace the floppy drive with the cdrom, and restart the laptop. The hard disk should be bootable and will run the same boot routine that ran off the floppy earlier, loading the cdrom drivers. Proceed to install your OS, be sure not to allow the drive to be formated during the OS installation.
(note: there are no actual spaces after the a and before the :, the forum won't allow the combination for some reason)
 
FUBAR|Ascain said:
Boot with the floppy, it will drop you at the command prompt when the cdrom detection fails.

Format c: /s to format the hard disk and make it bootable. (This will delete all information on it, I assume you know that already).

If you've already formated the hard disk, you can just sys a : c: to make the drive bootable.

You may also need to fdisk /mbr to put a bootstrap on it if the hard drive wasn't initialized.

copy a : c: (or xcopy if you prefer) to copy the contents of the floppy to the hard disk.

Shut down, replace the floppy drive with the cdrom, and restart the laptop. The hard disk should be bootable and will run the same boot routine that ran off the floppy earlier, loading the cdrom drivers. Proceed to install your OS, be sure not to allow the drive to be formated during the OS installation.
(note: there are no actual spaces after the a and before the :, the forum won't allow the combination for some reason)
Click to expand...

The prevention of ":" immediately following "A" is an old security "feature" from when the forums had HTML enabled. I guess they're too lazy to disable it again.

What version of Windows are you trying to install on this laptop?

Oh, and he said the HDD was already formatted.
:D
 
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