os install problem

[l8forwork]

I got one for the books. Got my paws on on old 1997 toshiba notebook with power hookup, good battery, BUT crashed WIN95 os.

No usb ports. No floppy drive, only cdrom. BIOs boot order choices are floppy,hhd or 2nd hhd

Now what? how to load os of any kind.

Put in WIN98 upgrade disk and it said software conflict FAILED.

Its got a 1.5GB hhd. Not a whole lot of room.

Got it to give me a DOS prompt. great ... formated c drive. BAD IDEA

Could have shot the os in on s/p ports on cable or from zip drive etc

or in dos form on a cdrom. Now what? hhd dead, cpu no boot?


Once the dos prompt was gone its DEAD

[MikeTbob]

I know old versions of redhat, version 5 thru 8 I believe, allow booting from a floppy disk. I'm not sure about other distro's. You might look here and see if you can get a boot disk.
http://www.bootdisk.com/

[l8forwork]

thanks fer the bootdisk link ... ill get some use out of that. At the store i owned we made disks with this type of info/files. for repair work but you had to go to the file and get it or find it if someone else was using it!

NOW to the rest of the story on the notebook........ remember

1 no floppy drive only cdrom
2 only boot from floppy or hhd now dead

ONLY way to load os remove the hhd put it in a notebook i could boot a os to for loading to hhd, load dos with cdrom support, copy os files to dir stop the load after file write... put the drive back in the old notebook. fire up dos, goto os dir setup go!!!

one dead notebook with new life/////////////////