Old laptop with blank hard drive and no floppy (only cd drive) 3

[chrispatt45]

I am trying to get a toshiba 200cdt laptop back to a state where I can install windows 95 again. I am currently getting the "missing operating system" on boot. I have tried making a boot cd from nero with fdisk and windows 95 boot but neither seem to run. I was wondering if anyone could help with this. The bios only give the option of booting from hard drive or floppy, yet, I only have a hard drive and cd rom so I assumed that setting it the boot from floppy would kick the cd rom in?. If anyone can help me on this I would be super grateful.

 

[wolluf]

If you can't get a floppy drive for the laptop and the bios doesn't have boot from CD option (how old is it - that option has been around a long time), can only suggest mounting the laptops hard drive in a PC (you can buy IDE adaptor - c. ?5 here in UK).

Once there, you'd need to make it bootable (if its a 9x machine, run a dos box and type sys X: where X: is laptop drive - assuming its partitioned and formatted (otherwise, fdisk & format first). If its NT/2k/XP machine, boot it from win95 boot floppy (

http://www.bootdisk.com

if you need one)and run command(s) from there. You might then copy the contents of the win95 boot floppy to the hard drive (overwriting when prompted), so the hard drive will act like a 95 boot floppy (think this will improve the copying of files when you attempt to install win95 - you may need to edit autoexec.bat/config.sys if references to A: rather than C: - I can't remember! - as it will boot when just SYS'd). Now copy the \win95 folder from the 95 install CD to the hard drive.

Put drive back in laptop - it should boot to a dos prompt. Change to \win95 folder and run setup. You may have fun and games if the laptop needs any drivers not on the 95 install CD, but it should install (has it got a network connection - could do with it!)

 

[lesgray]

If you have a windows 98 CD, you should be able to boot from it, say yes to cd-rom support and then pop in your win95 cd and run setup from DOS

Les Gray

http://www.creartec.com

 

[nipester]

Assuming you dont want to spend the money for the hard drive adapter, and you have any other laptop avialable you can swap the hard drive into another laptop, format and sys the drive, copy the win95 CD files over and put it back in the old laptop.

 

[chrispatt45]

Thanks guys, I will try those options and see how I get on.