no cdrom lap

[rico]

I have just bought an ibm thinkpad 560e and it does not have a cdrom. I want to be able to load up windows 98se.How do i do this? IT has a printer port and a serial port and an external floppy drive port which looks as if it is a 25 pin scsi.Please help

[kenja]

Looks like the PCMCIA port (small slot on the side) is used for an external CD-ROM, judging by the first search result here.

[Waltah]

Well there are 'options'. By far the best is using a CDROM. If the port you describe is indeed a SCSI port (probable ...) then a SCSI CDROM would be one way. (And older slower external CDROM drives are dirt cheap when you find them -- try eBay.) There are also external CDROM drives for PCMCIA ports. In either of these cases you'd have to get support for the drive into whatever operating system you already have (unless it's native -- it is in Win 95 and later.); such support will normally come with the device.

Many notebooks support a docking station with a CD ROM. If this one does, then finding (borrowing ...) a docking station would be an option.

Win 95 is available on floppy disks and I suppose '98 is too but loading a system of this size from floppies isn't most people's idea of a fun afternoon.

Finally, the way I do this is to use a parallel port tape backup device. Since everything ever made has a parallel port this is pretty much universal. I build the system I want on one machine, back it up to tape, install the tape backup support on the new machine (again, this may be native if you have the right combination of hardware and system) and restore the desired system to the new machine.

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Walt
Proving daily that the Peter Principle applies even to acolyte geeks ...