Trouble installing a different OS on ancient computer.

Ow……. You got a laptop!!!!!!.......... Sorry but my mind totally missed that. My mind just defaults to desktops. That means that a good portion of the stuff I told you will not be of much use….. Duh…..

Originally posted by Mr Tranny
Ow……. You got a laptop!!!!!!.......... Sorry but my mind totally missed that. My mind just defaults to desktops. That means that a good portion of the stuff I told you will not be of much use….. Duh…..

If I get a 3.5 for this, I can use my desktops 3.5 to transfer stuff.


Deebo

Sorry if this has been covered but, cant you boot the laptop into dos at start up and use the format code,
Install your dos and then on to windows?

Originally posted by Deebo
Hello all you computer guru's. I have a very old laptop that I need some help with. It is a pentium 120mhz 48meg, 10x cd-rom, and a 1.3 gig hard drive. The problem is it has windows 98 on it, which is about 1gig, so I basically am out of space (100-200mb left). I want to install dos 6.22 and windows 3.11 on it but it wont work. I have the dos install that I got from microsoft's (not capitalized on purpose) website, but when I run the setup file, it says wrong version of dos. How am I to go about formatting this thing and installing dos and win 3.11, from a cd? When I boot up the cd with the dos files it doesn't do anything, just goes right to windows 98, I checked bios and my cd drive is set 1st in the boot sequence so I dunno. Any ideas? Thanks!


Deebo

If it's skipping the CD and going right to windows. That means either your drive is retarded and not booting, or the CD isn't boot-able. You'll have to download an ISO file with a boot-able DOS 6.22 image www.allbootdisks.com... and burn the disk image to CD with a program like Nero or CDBurnerXP on a newer computer that can actually run Nero or CDBurnerXP lol. In other words the CD needs its own boot sector just like the original DOS floppy disk had on it. cdburnerxp.se... Make sure you're actually burning the ISO image to disk, and not just burning the ISO file to the disk.

Also, older CD-ROM drives don't always boot. You may need a floppy drive and have to actually create a real boot-able DOS floppy, which can be a very annoying task in this day and age.

The old DOS utilities, pretty much all of them, weren't compatible across versions. If you were using DOS 6.22 you had to use the 6.22 version of format/chkdsk/bootsect/io.sys/command.com. If you were using DOS 5.0 then the 6.22 versions wouldn't work and you'd have to use the 5.0 versions. Windows 98 was like DOS 7 or something. I don't remember exactly which DOS programs were version specific, but you get the idea. You have to be booted into the right version, DOS 6.22, to install DOS 6.22.

If the utilities saw a newer or older version of DOS on the drive than what they were meant to work with they would just error out with this message so you didn't mess anything up by accident.

If you want to revert to older version of DOS you have to boot from the disk and use fdisk from the version that you're trying to install. You have to delete all the partitions on the computer (usually there's only one). Recreate a new partition that uses 100% of the drive. Reboot the computer for the partitions to take hold.

Now you just have an empty drive with nothing on it so back up anything you want to keep before you do this. Now you should be able to format. Then you can run the setup program.

Originally posted by Deebo

Originally posted by Mr Tranny

I just burned the 6.22 boot to a cd, started comp and it just goes right to windows 98. Wont boot from cd even though bios says too..

Also tried fdisk to delete primary partition.. says "Could not change partitions because the disk could not be locked"
Deebo

Sounds like you may need to do an actual floppy. The reason the disk cannot be unlocked and therefore a new lock acquired is because Windows 98 has a lock on it already. The only way to get around the lock in a safe way is to boot from a floppy or CD so that Windows 98 never loads and therefore never gets the lock.

I have a few old laptops I play with as well. I even have a think-pad with no functioning hard drive and I still use it. I downloaded BartPe, and burned it per instructions with XP on my desktop. Even if the laptop won't boot initially from the cd, just start it up and let it go to 98. When you put the BartPe cd in the cd-rom (assuming your laptop allows autorun), the cd takes over the system on the hard drive, and you would be amazed at what you can accomplish.
I run BartPe on my laptop with no hard drive, and use utilities from my USB thumb drive (via PortableApps). You can also use a Linux live-cd the same way if you can figure out how to boot from the cd-rom. I use the SliTaz distro because I've never seen it fail to boot on anything. You can configure either to save files to the USB, and forget about the hard-drive. Got a 16 gbyte thumb-drive; you got a 16 gbyte hard drive so to speak...
Bart has another app that will allow you to install WinXp SP3 on your BartPe image. It probably takes a little work, but what doesn't. I think it's called BCD, but I'm not sure...
If I'm not mistaken (I never had to do it), BartPe will allow you to format and partition your disk. Maybe not, but it's definitely worth looking into.

Forgot to mention, for you sticklers out there; Using BartPe with WinXp doesn't violate the license from Microsoft (but only if you use it on the computer the license is for) If you're licensed for more than one computer, then you have no problems. But seriously, how will they know anyway????

Hey, and if you're thinking about security think about this... Without information on your hard drive, nothing can be compromised as long as you keep the USB thumb drive in a secure place (i.e. not plugged in to the laptop). If you leave the BartPe cd in the drive, the only information on it was burned beforehand. As long as your thumb drive is in a secure place, is password protected or even encrypted; your info is safe. Just thought I would add that. Good luck...