I am trying to load NT 4.0 on a laptop with a swapable FDD and CD-ROM. This is a Panasonic CF-25 48Mb Ram 2G HDD. New unused copy of NT bought off Ebay Laptop has DOS 6 presently installed, Boot up set to FDD I can go through all the instalation of the 3 floppys, then come to a point where it wants to read from the CD and it stops the instalation the only option is to press F3 to exit not to swap to CD-ROM and continue. Is there a way to install NT-4.0 given these circumstances. Thanks Nick

Did you know NT install CD is bootable (ie, you don't need to start install from the floppies, can just do it from CD - quicker too - just set bios to boot from CD)? PS. You'll have a pretty sluggish machine running NT on 48MB RAM.

Make/get a 98/me boot diskette with cdrom support. Copy fdisk and format to it. Boot up on the floppy diskette, fdisk and format [format c: /s] a 2gig partition [no larger]. Copy the floppy diskette to the drive and edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat to make a: c:. Then with the cdrom drive in the system boot to the hard drive. This will load cdrom support just like you would have booting the boot diskette. Put the NT cdrom in the cddrive. make a folder called i386 on c:. copy [cdrom drive letter]\i386\*.* c:\i386. Once complete cd to the c:\i386 folder and type "winnt /b " without the ""'s. This will start the floppiless install. Or, with the cdrom drive in the system containing the NT cd, set the bios to boot the cdrom drive and install will auto start. You can use install to create a 4gig primary OS partition using this method. give serious consideration to upgrading the memory in the system.