Install windows from floppy with swapable cdrom

[petersenj20]

I found the walk through by Rick here:
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic14204.html
And I have had several problems with it and hoping for help.
I have a Dell Lattitude laptop that has a floppy only. I found a cdrom that I can swap. It had windows 2000 and was missing some files and wouldn't boot.
I started this process and have had some luck but had some differences that doesn't make sense to me.

1st when I put in the 98 startup disk I never get a prompt for cdrom support. It just goes to the DOS A:\ prompt. I did Fdisk ok.Rebooted with floppy in. (Again no prompt for CDRom support-just to the A:\ prompt)
Then formatted the C drive went well.

Restarted to A: and tried to "copy D:\mscdex.exe C:" = Invalid drive specification so changed D to A and copied. The oakcdrom.sys file was missing so I downloaded from the net and copied.
Did all the copy and edit steps and went well. Removed Floppy drive and replaced with CDRom, then rebooted.

Rebooted and looks like it recognizes CDRom. It lists Device:MSCD001, # of drives 1. When I do the "D:\i386\winnt.exe" = CDR101: Not ready reading drive D. I entered "dir D:" and get same.

I don't understand why I am not getting the prompt for CDRom support. I assume when the copy D: failed this didn't load the CDrom and that is why not able to initialize the winnt.exe file.

Can anyone help me?
Joe

 

[petersenj20]

Oh yah. One more thing. I can't get into the BIOS on setup. When I press F1 to setup the laptop starts beeping repeatedly and displays a bunch of garbled letters and symbols.

I thought of maybe copying XP disk to thumb drive and installing this way but I don't know how to recognize the thumb drive.

 

[petersenj20]

No additional help from the board here?

I came up with a long workaround and now have XP installed. I am posting so others may benefit should they run into the same problem

I installed Linux Puppy on a thumb drive and WakePup to a floppy. WakePup finds the thumb and boots to it. With this running I copied the XP install files to the thumb drive and then to the hard drive.

Shut down with the 98 boot disk floppy in the drive. Then ran the setup files on the hard drive and the install went without a hitch.

I would have just used the Linux OS but doesn't seem to work with any of my hardware and some of the features are alien to me.(clicking things once open them and won't simply select them for) I know-seems rudimentary but couldn't get the hang of it. Maybe I'm just missing something or resistant to change.