Laptop problem loading Windows

[devonwolf]

I have an old Olivetti Echos P100e laptop currently without an operating system. This particular machine has a side aperture that takes either a floppy disc drive, or a CD-Rom drive. In other words, I cannot have both a floppy drive and a CD-Rom drive at the same time. When I acquired the machine with Win95 this wasn't a problem as I just switched drives, if necessary.

I wished to load Windows98 so I could add USB connectivity to my laptop. However, to do so I had to wipe the hard drive as my Win98 disc is for new systems only, and the HDD had some rubbish on it anyway. Unfortunately I didn't forsee the problems that this would give me.

Now comes the problem. I insert the floppy drive so that I can use the Win98 startup disk which starts up as usual but then tells me that, as I dont have a CD drive attached, I dont need CD drivers, so it doesn't load them.

The BIOS will only let me Boot from the A or C drives so whatever I have done up to now I cannot get the laptop to recognise the CD drive. I've tried copying the contents of the startup floppy to the now empty C drive and booting from that with the CD drive inserted, but it is still not recognised and it seeks for the floppy drive which is not there.

I'm not clever enough to work this out so thought I would ask if anyone out there could help me, even if I'm missing something obvious.

[joeka]

Without testing it, I'm not 100% sure this will work - but might at least give you some ideas and point you in the right direction...

The only way I can think of getting this to work is to get the C: drive to boot to DOS with CD-ROM support. You could try booting from the floppy disc and then format the C: drive as a system drive. So you would need to enter the command as follows: format c: /s

Once you've done that, copy the files from the floppy to the root of the C: drive. You should then be able to boot from the C: drive into a DOS prompt (as you would when you boot from the floppy), but with the CD-Drive attached.

It should then just be a question of running the Windows 98 setup from the CD-Drive.

Alternatively, if you have a spare copy of DOS, you could install that first and then install Windows..?

Hope this is of some help!