Laptop with no drive!

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Hi,

I have been asked to look at someone's laptop and while they don't know what it is they know it has no floppy or CD drive

They say they have an external CD drive (which they must plug in via PCMCIA).
Now this thing won't boot. Although I haven't looked at it yet a thought popped in to my head. How the hell would youreinstall the OS? It must be 98 if it is that old it has no floppy or CD drive? It must mean the BIOS will boot from the external

 

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Strange one that. It must be very old if it doesn't have either a cd or a floppy. Perhaps it has blanking plates where a pluggable cd can go?
Also If it's old then the BIOS may not pick up an external drive as they may not be supported. If the laptop has a network adapter you could see if you can get it to boot from the network (not even sure if win 98 can do this?).

I suppose that you wont be able to do anything until you've had a look at it.

 

Cheers Si. If the worst does come to the worst then I could whip out the hard drive and use my adapter that allows you to plug it into a standard IDE connector to ghost an image across.

 

Had a laptop like this before that was windows 98 and it did boot from the pcmcia external cd when restoring

Although i have seen some of these small laptops without drives that need to be placed on a manufacturers docking station to restore them

which is a bit off if you buy a laptop and dont want the docking station but still need to buy it if you ever want to restore the thing

but as you say if it has a bootable lan you could do a network install

 

Still waiting to see the laptop but what if it won't boot from the PCMCIA then how to I go about a network install?

 

Bart's Network Bootdisk , my good friend Boyce

Let me load Win98 on a lappy with no CD drive. Takes a bit of a tweak, but sweet when it kicks in

 

Nice one Gav.

 

Boyce, if you can boot to the command prompt in safe mode, you might find that the OS install files are installed already in the Windows/Options/Cab directory or some other place on the HDD. You can search the HDD for setup.exe and see what is there.

Dir /s/p setup.exe

You never know your luck. Then I would just run it and re-install windows on top of itself. You will need the original product key though.

Pete