Installing Win2K SP4 on a very old laptop

[raskren]

I'm having some troubles getting Windows 2000 on this old machine. Its a Pentium 90 with about 64 MB of ram and a 1GB hard drive. Its got a PCMCIA slot and I just bought a new (but cheap) ethernet adapter for it.

The problem is actually getting Windows onto the hard drive. The machine has a slot for either a 3.5" floppy drive or a CD rom drive. The CD drive is not bootable. I have to boot from Windows 2000 boot disks, which works fine up until everything is loaded from these disks and it looks for the CD Rom. I usually get a message saying that no valid CD rom drive could be found and installation aborts. The drive bay is not hot-swappable so removing the floppy drive once its done and inserting the CD rom drive shuts off the machine.

It looks like the only way to get this to work is to load a preinstallation image to the hard drive (yes, I used nLite on my copy to make it real small). I know this can be done over ethernet and I also bought an adapter to allow me to copy data from my desktop, directly to the 2.5" laptop HD over USB.

I'm very familiar with creating unattended CDs for use on new machines but never either of these methods. Is it simply a matter of loading an image to the hard drive and booting from a floppy to get setup started. Help I'm a noob.

Any help/suggestions are appreciated.

-Richard

[Incroyable HULK]

Since you have a USB adapter, you are able to partition, format and activate your disk drive. You can then copy the content of your Windows 2000 SP4 to the disk drive. Now you can reinstal the drive in the laptop and then boot from the floppy disk and then launch manually WINNT.EXE I think...located in I386

Maybe someone could confirm

[cje]

yes, you should be able to boot from a dos disk and start winnt.exe in th I386 folder when you copy it over.

[raskren]

Well, that's much easier than I thought it would be. But, when I launch setup, doesn't it load/unpack a bunch of drivers and then restart (thinking its on a cd)?

To clarify, is setup going to know the install files are on the hard drive and not on an ATAPI CDROM drive?

[raskren]

No luck last night.

I copied the entire contents of my nLite Win2K CD to the laptop hard drive over USB. I had also previously formatted the drive as NTFS to prevent the need for further formatting after setup. I created a floppy drive with NTFS support (read-only I think) and ran winnt.exe. I was immediately presented with a dialog box asking where the Windows install files were located. The default value in this box is D:\i386 (where they are). I hit return to accept and I get another error stating that the "configuration files could not be found or are corrupted" or something like that. I also tried removing winnt.sif, unattend.txt and unattend.bat from the source but I got the same error.

Does anyone know what configuration files this error is referring to?

Could the problem be read-only NTFS support?

[tguy]

I ran into the same problem, and yes it appeared to be with an NTFS formatted drive. I had to format the drive as FAT32 before it would work correctly. I could then convert it and extend it after I installed.

Another gotcha to remember is move the $OEM$ folder into the i386 folder instead of having it at the same level as you would in an unattended CD install.

Good luck.

[raskren]

If I format the drive as FAT32 would I need more than one partition? One for source content and the other for the install target? Otherwise, format would be formatting the media that it resides on...know what i mean?

[ToBe]

You don't need to format to get ntfs. After install, just type:

convert.exe c: /fs:ntfs

at a command prompt, that will convert the c: disk to ntfs without destroying the data on it.....

More info, works for win2000 as well:

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechn...convertfat.mspx

[prathapml]

would I need more than one partition?  One for source content and the other for the install target?

Yes, that'd be better. But you can get by, with just one large FAT32 partition that has the win2k install-source and is also the target - just remember to do the formatting prior to the setup itself (so that you can tell setup to not format the drtive).

[raskren]

So basically...

• Create a FAT32 partition for housing Win2k source
  
• Create an NTFS partition for Win2k installation
  
• Boot from regular FAT floppy
  
• Run WINNT from DOS command line
  

Right?

[prathapml]

• Create a FAT32 partition for housing Win2k source
  
• Create a FAT32 partition for Win2k installation
  
• Boot from regular FAT floppy
  
• load a memory manager like EMM386 for quicker install
  
• Run WINNT from DOS command line
  
• After install run from CMD - convert.exe c: /fs:ntfs (to make C: into NTFS )
  

That's more like it.

[raskren]

Well it worked, almost. I get to the 2nd restart and the machine will not boot. I don't even get a "missing operating system" message. Just a POST and that's it. I assume something is wrong with the partitioning/partition tables and the machine is trying to boot from the wrong partition. I used fdisk to set alternate partitions as active but nothing works.

[Incroyable HULK]

This topic is quite interesting... Today, I discovered a laptop (Compaq N600c) and a Desktop (compaq D510 USDT) wich refuse to boot from a USB CD-ROM. So I'll be happy to see the final solution... luckily, there is no rush for me right now

[raskren]

Hulk,

You're lucky! My laptop doesn't even have USB ports!

Would it be possible to simply create one big FAT32 partition on this drive and run setup on it, thus [hopefully] avoiding the booting issue?

I haven't tried it yet because of the time it takes to reformat the drive and put a new setup image on it. Its a slow drive talking to my computer over USB - I benchmarked it with Sandra for fun - ~7MB/s.

[tguy]

Hulk, you may need to go into the BIOS and enable the USB boot option. I had to do that to get the N600x to boot from a USB floppy.