Old laptop help

[Roscoroo]

Ok guys this isnt ah related.. but as ya know i fix up old pc's and donate them to needy families ect .. ive given away over 15 pc's now  in the last 2 yrs .



well i just got a
 compaq Lte lite 4/33C laptop

and after a little work ive got it to boot to the bios and to dos prompt  

whats wierd is i see the windows 98 flash screen go by as it heads for a load up , but it ends up on the dos C:\ prompt

I ran scandisk , did a surface scan on C: and it has what looks like a 209.4 mb hard drive in it ..

ive also tried a startup disk and have tried to get to at least safe mode . but its just not booting past dos .

there is no cdrom . so i have to work from floppy .   what im wondering is there some floppy i need to get it to boot  win 98 or does it have to be docked with anouther pc or other hardware ???

Any help would be apreciated Thx

[Schutt]

Maybe the win98 is in dos mode?

If you type "ver" on the dos prompt, what comes up?

[humble]

If it boots to C drive in dos you can run windows easily from their...if windows is in fact loaded...

cd/windows
then run the windows.exe file

I'd guess the old config file calls a nonexistant windows...

Did you run a Dir command to see whats on the drive?

[Roscoroo]

Originally posted by Schutt
Maybe the win98 is in dos mode?

If you type "ver" on the dos prompt, what comes up?

Windows 98 [Version 4.10.1998]

[Clifra Jones]

Rosc, did you acually rin the install from the set of win98 floppys? (all 28 or so of them)

Also, look for the hidden file msdos.sys, yu can edit it with the edit command it should contain lines like

;FORMATS
[Paths]
WinDir=c:\windows
WinBootDir="c:\windows
HostWinBootDrv=c:\
[options]
BootMulti=1
BootGui=1 <--this may be your problem

There are a bunch of XXX's at the bottom of the file to jeep it a certain size, do not remove them.

[StarOfAfrica2]

If it shows Win98 when you type "ver", its 98 running in DOS mode.  See humble's post above.

[Roscoroo]

i didnt load it .. its whats on it .. what i think is that since none of the higher dos commands work , and its showing uts partition as a 16 bit dos .... is that it was docked with another pc .

i found the port commands and im gonna try that later with an older pc .

i suspect that being a 33mhz is it doesnt have enough to run 98 on its own . i may have to load 95 on it .. i just dont remember if ive got floppys for 95 ...


yea i figured out its running win 98 in dos  ..

[StarOfAfrica2]

I believe I have a 95 CD around somewhere if you need it.

[llama]

The hard drive was simply formatted with a floppy disk that was formatted in Windows 98.

Hard disks formatted this way display the Windows 98 logo screen for a fraction of a second before winding up with a C:\ prompt.

I doubt you'll find any copy of Windows still on that system.

Time to find a Win98SE CD and install it from scratch...

-Llama

[wasq]

Why don't you try one of the smaller linux bootdisks like tomsrtbt  which will allow you to mount any device on the laptop and see what is on it?

[Roscoroo]

ive got  os2,3.1,95,98 ,98se,nt, and xp all in cd , some ware ive got 95 on floppys also . (gotta dig in the scary closet that has the bowling ball in it for them
)

1st thing is ive got to get the little monster hooked up to a pc w/ a cdrom either that or find the floppys and do it that way .

i might try open source (linux) perhaps too


btw Thanks for the replys guys .. its just a tinker project ...

[Schutt]

There are cheap adapters to hook up notebook ide hard disks to ide cable.

You can try hook the hd to a pc and load the install files to it. Only have to be carefull not touching the notebook hd on the spin axis they dont take that to well.