installation problem

[qu@ke]

i have an old IBM 560z laptop and i want to install windows 98 from the hard drive. my problem is i dont have a cd rom drive to copy the installation cd to the drive. i only have a floppy drive. im planning to copy the win98 installation cd to the drive via usb compact flash card. is this possible? i have two partitions on my drive. actually i already have win2k setup cd copied to the d partition before the whole thing crashes, but i cant install win2k from dos mode so im wondering if i could copy win98 to the drive without the cdrom drive and without copying everything from the cd to the floppy disk and transferring to the drive.

hope anyone can help me......................=)

[Jeff the Brit]

No reason why you can't copy the Win98 files to your drive with a flash card. You only need the files in the win98 folder on the cd, not the whole cd, assuming you don't need the driver collection on the Win98 CD. Hope you've got a big flash card !
The Win2k install CAN be started from DOS, change to the i386 folder, type winnt, hit Enter. Warning, it takes bloody AGES without smartdrive loaded, it makes more sense to make the 4 floppy disk boot set. Go to the Bootdisk folder and run makeboot.exe to get your 4 floppies.

[qu@ke]

but how do i load the driver for the compact flash reader? i also have created the 4 bootdisks, but still cant install win2k. whenever i go to the console and type d:, it returns with an error saying access denied.
thanks for your help...............................=)

[NooNoo]

sounds like you need an autoexec.bat that will load the dos drivers for the flash card - but the flash drive is usb.... catch 22. I think you would be better off getting a pcmcia network adapter that has the ability to run in dos. You can then copy the setup files across the network and run setup from the hard drive.

Failing that spend about $8 on laptop ide converter and put the setup cabs etc on the laptop hard drive using your desktop machine.

[qu@ke]

i already have a pcmcia network adapter and a pc ide card for the cdrom. the problem is it doesnt work for my laptop. it does work on other machines. i dont know, my ibm doesnt recognize any of this devices even when my os is still working. that's the reason why i bought a wireless usb adapter to connect to the internet. now that my os is screwed, my best shot is to copy win98 setup folder to the drive via usb. i just dont know how to do it in dos mode.........................=)

[NooNoo]

Dos and usb don't mix. (mostly ):D

[Diver01]

Just a thought.... In situations like this, I use a product called BackPack. It is a Parallel driven CDROm drive. There are a few sysyems that I support that require this device beacuase of its age.. old dos box, no cdrom ect... Might be usefull here...