well what i’ve got is a toshiba 660cdt laptop that a friend of mine just bought. no network card no 3 1/4 disk drive, windows me installed 48 megs ram. needless to say the first thing that has to go is winME, and a bios upgrade is probably in order for good measure.
can i upgrade the bios off a cd or the hard drive, or do i need to find a disk drive?
if I upgrade the bios will the most recent upgrade add boot from cdrom functionality? I cant find that information anywhere…
or to get an older version of windows on there without a 3 1/4 drive will i have to go through the oh so fun process of placing dos install files on the harddrive, manually deleting everything else and working in dos to return the cd rom drivers… then install win98 or 95?
CPU is likely a Pentium 150 and it’s over 6 years old, so I’d imagine boot from CDt capability is unlikely even with BIOS upgrade. If this option is present it should be listed in the BIOS boot config submenus.
Your best bet is to remove the hard drive and attach it to a 2.5 > 3.5 IDE adapter (about $ 10 or so) and put it in a desktop. Partition and Format it with FAT32, make the partition bootable, create a directory and copy the Win98 *.bin install files of the 98 install CD into that directory, then re-install the drive and install windows from that directory. You’ll want to put the necessary CD driver statements into the autoexec.bat and config.sys uiles so it picks up the CD at boot up.
IIRC a USB PCCARD adapter will not work with this machine as the onboard PCMCIA slot is the older 16 bit PCMCIA type not newer PCCARD 32 bit (required by USB adapters).
FWIW at 150mhz this thing is real doorstop with limited modern functionality, and you might want to re-evaluate just how much work you want to put into this project. Also make sure you have all the required 98 hardware drivers before you blow out the ME install.
gah! i cant get windowsme to boot into a command prompt because i dont have the disk, or find a version of dos i can try to install without a disk drive… any possible instructions as for what to do? as i’ve said i dont want to have to spend any money so an adapter or disk drive is out of the question, i’m almost positive theres a way to do this… stupid win me…
ok… that would be great if i HAD a floppy drive… if i did i wouldnt need any help setting it up. i have 1 hard drive with windows me installed on it and 1 cd rom that i cannot boot from. i need to find a way to upgrade from windows me to windows 98, (its an upgrade believe me) without hosing the HD and losing the cd-rom drivers
If you don’t have an external boot device you’re going to have to take the hard drive out and slave it to a desktop for configuration. There’s no other way sort of botrrowing a PCMCIA based hard drive or floppy .