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Is it possible to start an 486 laptop with a cd-rom drive without a floppy-disk? Can I prepare a hardrive on an other computer/laptop with an autoexec.bat?
Name: Andrés Date: May 28, 2002 at 09:21:22 Pacific
Reply:
The ability of your laptop to boot up from a CD depends on its BIOS. It is the BIOS the code that handles whether to boot up from a diskette, a hard drive or, if allowed, an ATAPI CD-ROM drive. You should enter the BIOS setup and check there. On the other hand, why do you care about autoexec.bat?. Do you know its true relevance, compared to other files in your hard disk?. The answer to the question is yes, you can prepare a drive in another laptop and then install it in the 486, but be aware that you may require new drivers *and* if its a Compaq laptop, do not erase nothing on the hard drive related to it!!!. If you do, you may not be able to enter the BIOS setup of your 486, because the BIOS itself is saved on the hard disk. Be careful.
If you have another laptop with a floppy and cdrom drive You could use it to 'format /s' the drive and copy the Win9X folder from the CD to the hard drive. Then restore the drive to the original laptop and you should be able to boot to dos and run the install from the folder that you copied.
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Response Number 3
Name: Al Tietz Date: May 28, 2002 at 12:52:36 Pacific
Reply:
Henk, I know what you're asking. You could format the hard drive, then copy the contents of the 98 Boot disk to the hard drive, then "sys c:". That will give you the ability to start the CD without having to dump the whole CD to your hard drive. You may have to do an edit on the config.sys or autoexec.bat, and point things to A: rather than c:. I've done it a few times, without a hitch.
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