How can I install xp pro to a laptop with a floppy and usb cdrom that isnt recognized

Status
Not open for further replies.

xPLaR

Posts: 6   +0
ok this is really bugging me now. ive been working at this for the last...6 hours. i have a laptop here (dell latitude c600) and it has a floppy drive but no cdrom. so i have a usb cdrom case thing that you can put IDE drives in. it wirks fine when windows is installed but somehow something got wiped from the laptop and to make a long story short it was formated to fat32 using a win 98 bootdisk. i can use the xp bootdisks to do the beginning of the install of xp but when it gets to the part where it wants to format the drives it says there is no cd rom installed. i tried what it said in this post but it still says there is no cdrom. i also tried to do a RIS with my server 2003 comp but when i boot the laptop with the ris disk the dhcp thing times out. anyone that can give me any clues as to what to do to get xp on the laptop will be greatly appreciated. i have RIS all setup on my server and the image is already on it and it says that dhcp is working properly. i am willing to try almost ANYTHING short of buying a cdrom for the laptop as its not mine.
 
thanks. how do i extract this to a floppy though? i haven't had to do this stuff in a long time.
 
Any decent archiver suite should be able to open .gz files. Try WinZip or WinRAR.
 
i can open the gz fine and i got a prog to extract the files from the img but when i put them on a floppy it doesnt boot. so i boot into dos because i have the win 98 thing loading up and i run autoexec.bat from the floppy and it says there is no usb cd rom installed. ive tried different bootdisks and they all say the same thing.
 
You are not supposed to extract files from the img. It is a disk image and you are supposed to write it directly to a floppy. Perhaps your program can do it. If not, try something called rawrite.
 
ah yes. rawwrite. thats what i was looking for. i know i had to do this once before but i couldnt remember the prog i used with the img file.
 
Nodsu said:
Many laptops support booting directly from USB devices. Check in the BIOS setup and the friendly manual.

Try this Win98 bootfloppy with USB CDROM support I made myself a few weeks ago: http://nodsu.mine.nu/dosusbcd.img.gz
I have downloaded and wrote this image to a floppy and I can see my USB CDROM from a command prompt but I cannot access any hard drives. If anyone can help me with why it would be appreciated. The C: drive is formatted as NTFS, and I think this could be the problem.
 
Make sure primary boot is set to usb device. Also, if it has no cd drive it must be an old system... Maybe there is not enough memory or so for it to install win xp

Regards,

Korrupt
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back