This problem is outside the limits of my geekdom, so TIA for any help you might be able to provide.
A friend of mine recently received an old IBM StinkPad as a gift. It has no CD-ROM drive, but it does have two PCMCIA card slots. It has a slightly-corrupt-but-functional install of Win95 on it. We want to install Win98. Here’s my question…
What’s the best way to do this without a CD-ROM? I was thinking that I could install an Ethernet card, hook this piece of crap up to my home P-to-P network and install Win98 from a shared CD-ROM drive on one of my other computers. Anyone ever try this? Is there another option I haven’t considered?
I have run into the problem you describe and I solved it was by doing exactly what you plan to do. The only other way I can think of is to get your hands on an external CD-ROM drive.
If you have enough room on the ThinkPad’s hard drive, I would recommend copying the entire (IIRC) \win98 directory to the hard drive, and then run the setup from there. That way you do the copying all at once, only once, and if windows has a problem with the ethernet card during setup for some reason, you’re not totally hosed.
Be sure you delete the \win98 directory from your hard drive when the setup is completed. (It’s a few hundred megabytes.)
Been there done that a few times with old Thinkpads.
Giraffe’s suggestion is the best overall if you have 200 megs or so to spare on the hard disk and can borrow an ethernet PC card (you can get ethernet 10BT PCMCIA cards for $20-$25 dollars on net auctions). Be sure you want to install 98 though. If it’s a 486 or old pentium with 16 megs of RAM or less you would probably be better off with 95 re system responsiveness as 98 would tend to really bog down a system with limited resources.
If you decide to get a net PCcard for the transfer make sure whatever PC card you get are slot 1 compatible and not slot 2 as many older tpads will not take slot 2 cards.
If you are really into it you might want to look at getting a docking station. These are typically 50-80 dollars used for old tpads. Ebay is a good place to look for these.
I’ve had to install software remotely several times here at work, and it actually works pretty well. I would recommend copying the .CAB files from the Win98 directory on the CD to someplace on the hard drive. Otherwise, everytime you re-install a Windows component, or even change a system setting, it will want the CD. With the .CAB files copied, point it at the directory you copied them too, and Windows should find everything it needs.