Win95 to Floppy?

[ErnieK]

I have aquired an old notebook. A Toshiba T2110. The battery no longer retains a charge but it runs fine from the mains. I have run various stress tests and diagnostic tests and all come up clean and in good order.

It has Win3.1 on it. I would like to replace this with Win95 (if possible - do not think it will take Win98), and here lies my problem. The laptop went with Noah into the ark as as such has no CD drive. I only have Win95 on CD and cannot get my hands on the Floppy installation disks.

Everybody I ask all say the same. "I threw them in the rubbish bin as they are of no use nowadays" needless to say I use a few expletives when thay tell me this and call them all the worhtless names under the sun.

Is it possible to breakdown the win95 Cd onto floppies so that I can then install it from them? Or even Win98 though the lack of memory restricts me form using it.

[pave_spectre]

Dont know if THIS (http://home.satx.rr.com/badour/html/w95_floppies.html) will help.

[valver]

maybe it's more practical to loan an external cd drive...
david

[jeeza]

Didn't I come across a post some time ago by someone who had a similar problem, and who - as I understood it - solved the problem by unmounting the hard drive from the laptop, mounting it in a computer with a CD-Rom drive, installed his OS, and then put the HD back into his laptop ?

[ErnieK]

Pave
That looks like a good site, I will have a good look shorlty.

Valver
If you stay loacally and have one could I borrow it? :D I don't know anyone with one.

Jeeza
I know even less about laptops (this is the first I have been able to get my hands on)than I do about desktops, but as the hard drives are only two & a half inches as compared to three & a half in desktop how would I get a connection. Also is it easy to remove and re-insert the HDD to and form and to the laptop

[Budfred]

You can buy a conversion kit to install a 2.5 inch drive in a 3.5 inch port, but it will cost you. You can also get a 2.5 inch drive enclosure that would allow you to connect to the laptop, but I an not sure of the connection types available. If the laptop is really old, it probably doesn't have USB, so you would have to have a serial or parallel port connection. The other option would be to look on eBay or similar places that sell old stuff and get an external CDRom that uses parallel or serial connectors. Slow, but effective for what you want....

[pave_spectre]

Another thing I saw was to usea LapLink cable(dont know exactly what one is) to connect the laptop to a desktop and copy the win95 CD to the laptop hard drive and install from there. Obviously the hard drive needs to be big enough to fit both the CD and the installation on.

[ErnieK]

Laptop is from '94 or '95 era as far as I can find out.

The link that pave put up gives nice easy instructions for putting to floppy. I will be tryin to do it today or tomorrow (after I scrape up 30 floppies) and will let you know if it works. If it does I will also see if it is possible to do it with Win98 (just out of curiosity) after I try and install 95 onto the laptop.

The HDD is small, only about 250MB so no chance of copying the CD toit before trying install. As for the conversion kit, it's not worth the expence.

If I could get it working it would make a very handy backup computer in an emergency for getting on the net to get help for other things. If I cannot get it working I will then have the chance to strip down to see what the inside looks like. Don't want to do that though unless I finally make it in-operable.

[Inka]

Adapters for installing the 2.5 inch Laptop HDD into your desktop PC are available very cheaply. I was looking recently at one which was £9.99 from my local computer shop.
Those CAB files & others as listed on PAVE's link is all you would need to copy over so 250MB would be big enough. Darn site quicker than making a huge pile of floppies :)

btw - I went for a rummage & found a set of Office95 floppy discs!! (ok so I hate throwing anything out!) No win95 tho..

[ErnieK]

SUCCESS!

Pave's link worked a treat. Went as follows.

Formated 30 floppies using "Maxdisk" (link to shareware download available from within Pave's link) then discovered that I had used the wrong format.
Formated 30 disks using the correct format (1.7 DMF) and sick of the site of floppies by this time.

Followed instructions, which are VERY easy to follow, coppied over all the relevant CAB files plus other files as per instructions. Even sicker of floppies. Now have square black smudges in front of my eyes.

Grabbed laptop and started installing. Installation had no problems of any kind, no hiccups, did not stop sweating for 3 hrs until install was completed. WHOOPPE!

340 MB HDD
4MB (four) Memory
Pentium 486
Not to sure of the rest yet but will have a good look over the next few days.
Win95 running OK albeit slowly. Just do not expect me to do anything on it until I can get my hands on memory and then figure out how to get in and install it.
Total time taken? just over 6 hrs.
Total cost for a working laptop? £5.00 (see below)

Two years ago I picked up an "Xircom" "Credit Card 33.6 Ethernet+Modem" for £5.00 at a car boot sale. Still in the box and never used. All cables, disks and manuals in box as well, along with other software. I now know what it's for (had no idea at the time, only knew it was for a computer and was "New") and have installed modem and network card drivers. Not tested them yet due to memory, though the windows modem diagnostics give good results, and the network card is 10 Base-T so should work with my router and my old hub.

Inka
How many disks in the office 95? Are you on broadband/cable? Hint Hint!

I am now going to Crucial to see if I can find memory prices
:D :D :D :p :p :p (guess who's pleased with himself tonight)

[Paul Komski]

I think you will do your head in messing with floppies in the manner suggested. They are bad enough at the best of times (even the original Win95 floppies) are liable to corruption and you only need to get one bad system file to screw up your installation.

Wouldn't advise doing the actual installation on another pc but just copy the installation files to a folder on its HDD - by whichever method you use to copy the files over. You can then use a floppy boot diskette to run the installation setup.exe directly from the HDD.

Win98 is going to take forever to convert to floppies - be very cramped on 250MB - and balk at installing at all if under 66MHz CPU.

HE HE
Only just seen your SUCCESS story!!! :) :cool:

[pave_spectre]

Damn 30 Floppies!:eek:

I think I would have gone spare after about number 10.:p Especially if I got them wrong the first time.

Congrats:D

[ErnieK]

30 x 3 = 90 (wrong/right/copy) floppies handled. Plus about 4 that had bad sectors.

Who was it that was saying the floppy is on its way out and is no longer requried? As for going spare - well I have been told for years that I am not right in the head, so maybe this confirms it.:D