Alrighty, I have a CF27 toughbook circa 1999/00 or so, old enough that there is no option to boot via the USB port, and the way this is set up, it will not read and boot off of a CD on startup, once you install an OS the CD drive works fine. Which means: -have to use a Floppy Disk (funny to see how many have never used a floppy disk) -that has the drivers for a CD on it that I can copy to the C drive so they will be there upon boot up or otherwise. ATM it is running a version of DOS (6.22) that won't allow me to boot from a win 98/ME boot disk. Suggestions?
There use to be an Fdisk tool for DOS to partition the drive and reformat but it has been so many years since I've done it. Might be a good place to start or might not help at all. I don't remember being able to boot directly from the CD with '98 just install after partition reformat but could be an artificial memory.
Yeah have done that, fidsk/1/1/yes etc I have the cdrom driver copied to the C: drive with SYS C:, problem is now, how to load the thing, it is like hieroglyphics though, and so old even google sort of chokes on the topic. What I need is sort of: GSCDROM /load high
It's a big "if" but..... If you have a working USB port you could try to get your hands on an external plug and play CD drive and you could try to boot the CD from that peripheral.
Have one of those hommie the BIOS laughs at your attempt!: Tonight is workout/work on ancient laptop night! I have some Compaq Aeros that have..24 mb of memory...we are talking WFW 3.11..currently working on a gateway 5300 with a bad keyboard.
Damn it was worth a shot...... In XP that external CD drive will show up in your boot sequence as its self.
All good man, there are boot disks that install both an A: drive and the CD Drive, usually named D/E/U, have one of them just do not know how to use the thing, the last time I did know we were 11-5 in 08.. TBH, the OS I'd really like to plunk around with is NT 3.51, the sort of pre-runner to XP and Vista.
If your BIOS doesn't natively recognize your CD drive, then I don't think any of us know what we're doing with this thing. Have you already sought the help of one Fred Flintstone on the matter?
Oh sure, it is supposed to recognize it automagically, however..it doesn't, I think it is milsurplus and for whatever reason..no joy. More then one way to do it though, do have a extra box of that model, HD swap, reformat in the other one, but it is a real piece of crap to mess around with..think the mouse pad was crushed.. Only reason I'm bothering is to have a lap top to carry around that I won't really care if it is stolen.
20 dollar laptop Killahp, as long as the Wifi works on it what does it matter? Think of it as a netbook donation.that weighs 10 pds.
Greatest paperweight ever; though it could probably hold down a beach blanket on a windy day . Or you can use it to break open pistaschios and peacans. If you ever run into a bear out in the wild you could probably put it into a coma and escape. Or even use it as a ramp to work on your car. Tough indeed.
Started a thread or two in my day Killahp.. And TBH, the command line I need will save me a ton of work if I can find it.
Hah! of all of the stupidz things, the darn A drive was interferring with the write to the C: drive, disable in the A drive in the Bios and everything worked just fine...stupid junk.
Sort of, when I finish with say 8-10 of the things I sell them to make a modest profit, not enough to keep the lights on but nice side money. Or give a couple away to the school kids who really can't afford anything, 1 Ghz and you can still do most things on the internet and that standard has been around for awhile.
Oh, as for the actual solution, what I had forgotten is the BIOS in these old boxes are very very forgiving, I simply formatted the drives in a different laptop, put it into the CF27, and let it auto detect the "new" hardware the drive just discovered, worked like a charm. Downside was I spent hours trying to rescue 2 drives that were just bad..hours...format, low format, lba format, install the system and each one did not make it past the second boot up until the infamous "no operating system found" came up at boot.
