About 8 months ago I was given an old 486 laptop. Its a ibm thinkpad 360c with a 486 33mhz proc., 4mb ram 170mb hard drive.
It came with ms 6.20 dos and it was ok for a while. I was given a set of win 95a instal floppys , 21 in all, and installed it with a few downloads from ibm's web site . With only 4mb of ram it was SLOW so I found a 16mb ram card and installed it . Oh what a diff it made!!! I also added an ethernet pcmcia card and started to play around with networking it with my main computer.
Then I installed 98lite on my main machine and wanted to install it on the laptop but my har drive was not quite large enough.
Then I tried a network install of win98, then a network install of nt4 then linux but I could not get anyone of them to work.
I knew if I could get the install files on the hard drive I could install nt4 but after I copied the nt4 i386 folder to the laptop
and started the install in dos and after I deleted all the win 95 stuff it still did not have enough space to install , remember I am working with only 170mb hd. here.
Also I forgot to say that it DOES NOT HAVE A CD !!!
So this is how I did it.
First I copied the nt4 i386 folder on to the hard drive of my main computer then restarted in ms-dos and "cd c:\i386" then
"winnt" then started the install with it asking where the install files are located then let it create the 3 nt install floppys .
After it makes the last floppy it creates a temp folder on the hard drive .
After it copys all files needed it will reboot , as I did not want to install nt4 on my main computer I removed the boot floppy and rebooted back into win98 and found what I was after a temp file named $win_nt$~ls
and after I copyed this folder to the laptop hard drive I deleted everything but it on the drive .You must delete all folders even the hidden ones.
After I did that I was left with the winnt4 temp install folder and I simply rebooted using the 3 install floppys that I made when I created the orig temp install folder on my main computer.
Then the install went fine!!!!
now my old 486 33mhz 170mb no cd drive laptop is running nt4 !!!

I should say that if you try this make sure to install any needed networking during this install because if you wait to install networking later it keeps asking for the win nt4 cd !! and with no cd drive thats could be a problem.
Also nt4 on a 486 with only 20 mb ram runs about the same as win95a. Which is ok.