I own a notebook HP600c that use to have a pcmcia minidrive a new one is to expensive so I'd like to use my zipdrive 100mb parallelport to install an o.s.like dos but dos doesn't want to install because it's not a harddisk is there a way around this?

You do not say if you have a floopy drive or not, But I will take it you do not. MS-DOS is very picky about how it is installed. Does your HP have a 2.5" Hard Drive, If so remove it and ask a freind or computer store to make it DOS bootable for you.

thanks for your reply and yes I do have floppy drive I can also acces de zipdrive with a bootable floppy but I would want to be able to start dos 6.22 on my zipdrive by a dosprompt command after booting there through my floppy so how do I put dos on my zipdrive?/ ronald bos

Hi Ronald I think I understand what you want to do ! You do not have a hard drive with your laptop and were hoping to use a parallel zip drive as a bootable drive. Outa luck ! Unfortunately, due to a lack of support in the BIOS, parallel zip drives are not able to be made bootable ( only the internal IDE ones have this capability ) So - looks like you are on to plan number 2 ! Krystyna

There is a way to 'cheat'.. Which involves an MS-DOS 6.22 bootdisk... Create a MS-DOS bootdisk which has only these files on it... io.sys, command.com,msdos.sys,himem.sys,emm386.exe Also include any drivers you need loaded in config.sys and of course your zip disk driver files. config.sys should be: device=himem.sys device=emm386.exe dos=umb,high lastdrive=z (include any other drives you need loaded here) autoexec.bat should be guest.exe On your zip drive, copy over an entire installation of ms-dos 6.22 to a directory called dos. Copy command.com to the root directory of the zip disk. Boot the computer with the ms-dos bootdisk... After it finds the zip drive issue these commands: set comspec=d:\command.com set path=d:\;d:\dos substitute the d: above with whatever drive guest found when it ran. That's it! You can now remove the flopppy and the dos installation will run from the zip drive. If you are sure that guest will assign the same drive letter everytime you boot (I.E. You don't add any new hard or CD-ROM drives) then you can tack the above two lines to the end of the autoexec.bat file. There is another way to do it that searches every available drive but in the interest of time I haven't included it. Let me know if you want an explanation. Hope that helps and reply back if you have questions/problems. -Michael

Urm, Michael if he could add a harddrive why try to boot from a zipdrive? Take your point about a CD drive (It would have to be PCMCIA, then that would be a problem as well!!)

hi folks I can't afford a pcmcia harddisk they cost nearly $350 I just needed to put windows 3.11 {don't laugh}so I can send and receive email. Anyway Michels solution works well If anyone knows where I can find a cheaper {maybe secondhand} pcmcia harddisk for my HP omnibook 600c please let me know in the meantime I 'll do with Michels solution that works like a charm R.Bos Thanks for your responses R.Bos