Anyone know how I can install WinME or 98 onto a notebook that only has a floppy drive? I've got a zip drive as well that may be of some help to me.....

here is info for doing it with win95b not sure about millennium http://www.grsoftware.net/disk/software/grduw.html (use grduw for making dmf floppies) How to create a floppy installation of Win95b (OSR2) using OEM cd-rom. how to create my own installation diskettes from the cd-rom that I already had. I knew that you can't create a win95 install from the original release of win95 because the cab files were ~2MB in size. Too large to fit on a single disk, even if it was formatted to DMF (Distribution Media Format) size of 1.68MB. The Win95b version didn't suffer this problem because the cab files were just under 1.68MB so the only problem was formatting a diskette to DMF and finding out what files were needed on diskette 1, 2, 3 etc. The first disk needs to be formatted to 1.44MB. This is because a system without win95 cannot read DMF diskettes. Once win95 is on it, it can read and write to DMF (although it still cannot format one). The EXTRACT.exe utility on the first floppy lets the win95 installer read and write DMF disks. That's why the installer can read disk 2, 3... during installation. Anyway, after a bit of tinkering (and cheating by seeing how others have done it), I came to the following set of files for disk 1. They all come on the cd-rom in the \Win95 directory. Simply format a disk to 1.44MB, give it a volume label of "DISK1" and copy these files from the \win95 directory on the CD-ROM. If you find yourself having to create win95 disks often then you could write a batch file to automate it. PRECOPY1.CAB DOSSETUP.BIN EXTRACT.exe MINI.CAB DELTEMP.COM SCANDISK.PIF SAVE32.COM SCANDISK.exe README.TXT SETUP.TXT SETUP.exe SCANPROG.exe WB16OFF.exe SMARTDRV.exe XMSMMGR.exe WINSETUP.BIN Next, get your hands on a utility to create DMF disks. A good one is MaxiDisk available from www.herne.com. You're going to need 27 DMF-formatted floppies, so make sure to have more than that available. Most HD disks will have no problems formatting to DMF, but if you use really cheap disks then you may run into lots of errors. Set whatever utility you're using to verify the format. Don't forget to set the volume label as "DISK2". Copy the following files from \win95 directory of the cd-rom to disk 2. PRECOPY2.CAB WIN95_02.CAB Next, just copy the remaining cab files to the other DMF diskettes. WIN95_03.CAB goes on disk 3, WIN95_04.CAB on disk 4, etc. Don't forget the volume labels on these either. You're done. Now you have a set of Win95 OSR2 install floppies. What's nice about being able to create your own set of install disks is that if someone burns a copy with their name/company on it, you can undo the damage by creating a new disk. By the way, the registration info is saved on disk 2. So if someone goofs up your install disks by branding them, just recreate disk2. You will need to reformat the disk, since the user info is not saved in the files. Its saved on a sector in the floppy, so you will need to reformat the disk to DMF and recopy the cab files from cd-rom ag---------------

hate to tell you this, but there are CAB files in WinME that are way larger than 2 megs. A number of them are 8 M in size. The thing to do is probably to dig up an old stand alone CD-ROM drive, and use it. In fact, I was just looking at one tonight on the surplus shelf of an office I work in. Shouldn't be hard to find one on eBay cheap.

Use your ZIP drive to install Win 98. You will need DOS drivers for the Zip drive, the program is called Guest.exe It will be on your old disks that came with your parallel ZIP drive, or else download from www.iomega.com 1. Copy the contents of the Win 98 folder on the CD to two Zip disks if only 100 mb disks( won't fit on just one ) 2. Format the hard drive using FORMAT C: /S You need to make the hard drive bootable. 3. Load the ZIP drive through DOS. 4. Make a directory on the hard drive called C:\Wincabs 5. Copy the contents of both zip disks to the Wincabs directory 6. Reboot to the hard drive 7. Change to C:\Wincabs 8. Run SETUP from that directory 9. Should work fine !

Use laplink V5.0 Dos version. Copy all the files from the cd to the laptop via Laplink program. then run setup.exe.