Another way to do this
Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Windows 2000 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by DNA
(552 messages posted)
You could remove the hard drive from the laptop and use an IDE(2.5")-to-USB adapter
(or a 2.5" IDE-drive external USB enclosure) to connect the 2.5" drive to a desktop.
The adapter or enclosure is worth having around anyway, because you can retrieve
your data from the laptop's drive if Windows won't start, or if the laptop gets damaged.
The enclosure is even better, because you can put another hard drive in it, and use
it for general backup/file transfer purposes!
When the drive is connected to the desktop, you can retreive any of your old data
off of it. If the drive is less than 32 binary GB (usually the case on older laptops),
you can format the drive as FAT32 from within Win 2K/XP, without 3rd party software.
Then, copy Setup.exe and the i386 folder to the root directory of the
laptop drive. If you need to install SP4 separately, you can copy W2KSP4_EN.EXE to
C: as well.
Reinstall the drive in the laptop, and boot with your Setup floppy disk. Go to C:
, then type DIR, to make sure that Setup and the i386 folder are seen in C: by your
Setup disk. Then you can run Setup from that point.
I've installed 98 and XP to my laptop in this manner, because Setup runs much faster
when the installation files are on a hard drive (vs. optical), and you save wear
on the optical drive.
On my desktop, I partitioned my laptop's new 120 GB drive into 3 partitions (with
Partition Magic 7), copied the Windows 98 CD's Win98 folder to C:, copied the XP
Pro's Setup.exe and i386 folder to E:, and I was good to go! (I converted E: to NTFS
after XP was installed)
I've hardly ever used the optical drive in my laptop! I used external hard drives
connected to a USB 2.0 PC card to install virtually all of the programs on that laptop
(I did have to install the Maximus Decim Generic USB drivers for Win98SE from
a CD-RW, but once that was installed, I could use my external hard drives!)
I'd have to say that once you have Win2K SP4 installed, you won't really 'need' an
onboard optical drive. With SP4's generic USB driver, you could install most programs
from a USB flash drive/hard drive, and you could also use an external optical
drive!
-----------------------------------------------------------
Athlon 3000+ 939 - 1GB RAM = 98SE (@768 MB RAM) & XP Pro SP2
Athlon 4000+X2 AM2 - 3GB RAM = 2000 SP4 & XP Pro SP2
IBM ThinkPad PIII 933 - 512 MB RAM = 98SE & XP Pro SP2
Windows 2000 Server in the basement
| 
