Recently I acquired somewhat of an.. old laptop. It's not ancient by any means, but isn't a Vaio. My question is regarding the reformatting of its hard drive. Suffice it to say, I have none of the original CDs or disks that came with the laptop*. As it stands, the laptop has a Win95 OS with a lot of proprietary business software on it. Since I am now the proud owner, I'd like to perform a complete reformat of the hard drive. Being a tinkerer, that's what I do best ;-)
Anyway, I was wondering... would a Windows 98 CD be all I need to get this puppy back up after an FDISK? The CD-ROM drive is removable, and I'm not sure how laptops operate regarding removable drives and what kind of disks I might need to load software.
I can provide specs on the laptop upon request.
Thanks!
I acquired the laptop as part of a … business deal. Basically, the company I was using it for went under and I inherited a laptop, printer, and scanner.
Initially, I’d say if you have a bootable win98 CD, then yes, that’s all you need, but maybe you’d best cough-up the specs on your system, just in case. It may not support booting from the CD-ROM drive. Check you BIOS to see if you can set the boot order to include the CD drive. You can create a bootable start-up disk from Control Pannel | Add/Remove Programs | Start-up Disk before slicking the drive, but I forget if it’ll add the CD-ROM drivers for you, or if you have to add them on your own.
If you’ve got to add your own, then you’ll need to edit the Autoexec.bat and Config.sys files to include them. Oak Technlogy used to have instructions and generic drivers for just this purpose. Unfortunately, they’ve ceased to support CD-ROM technolgy, so I’m not sure where you’d go for the files right now, besides the OEM and M$.
If the system BIOS is able to see a bootable CD and boot from it, you’d be good to go…if not you’d need a bootable floppy disk with cdrom drivers on it.
I have an older toshiba and I had to get into the bios (an interesting task inof it self – I had to run a dos based program to edit the bios) to set it to boot from the CD before the HDD
Yes, you should be able to use Win98 on your laptop as I used to use it on a 133Mhz laptop. If you have access to another machine that already has Win98, use it to make a Win 98 boot disk as the Win98 boot disk (but not the Win95 boot disk) gives you CD-ROM drivers. This will be useful to do the fdisk and format even if your CD-drive is bootable, and this will work even if you can’t boot from CD-drive.
If you have a laptop in which the floppy and CD-ROM swap into the same bay (I hate that), then first start up the win98 boot disk. Everything loads into a ramdisk in memory, then swap out the floppy and swap in the CD-rom Drive to install the software (D:setup).
Well…depending on the RAM and CPU it actually might be best to stick with 95 on an old laptop as 98 requires a pretty major step up in the amount of system resources required to run it with any degree of speed or efficiency.
If you have the horsepower to run 98 all you need to do is make a 98 boot up disk off a 98 machine. This most easily done with the Add Remove Programs-Windows Setup applet under Control Panel and put fdisk and format on it. Delete the old partition and fdisk the drive with fat32.
Most laptop CDs are IDE/ATAPI so the generic IDE CD drivers on the 98 boot floppy should boot the CD. Test that this is the case before you scrub the disk. If the default drivers don’t work you will have to pick the appropriate CD drivers out of the notebook autoexec.bat and config.sys files and roll your own.
If the 98 install CD is an upgrade CD (as most are) it will ask you for a win 95 CD for verification during the install process if installing on a blank disk so have one handy. Beyond that installation is pretty straightforward.
If the old laptop requires any unusual drivers that 98 may not bundle into it’s install cabs make sure you put them a floppy before scrubbing the disk or otherwise back them up.
Thanks for the quick replies, everyone! Painlessly, I was able to overhaul my laptop this evening, with few problems. All in all, I’m glad I did. Turns out the CD-ROM was supported anyway, so it went off without a hitch.
