Laptop without OS

[halseyca]

Have inherited an old Fujitsu laptop (Pentium 150) without an OS. On boot, get the 'invalid system disk' error message.

Hard disk was formatted from DOS without system files written to the drive. It has a CD drive in the bay, no floppy drive available.

Can I take the hdd out and plug it into a desktop?

Any help would be appreciated.


Would like to install W98 so my 5yo daughter can bang up an old computer and not any of my modern ones.

[Bad Dog]

Can I take the hdd out and plug it into a desktop?
Yes.
http://www.bay-wolf.com/hddadapter.htm
Good luck.
BD:disgust:

[Baser-X]

If you have a CD burner on one of your modern comps, this should help:

Go to bootdisk.com and download the Windows ME boot disk.
On a computer with a floppy run the Windows ME Boot Disk exe file that you downloaded. It will write all the boot disk data to the floppy.
Next Take and copy all of the files from the floppy you just made to a CD.
After that, if it is not already, make the CD drive the first boot device in the BIOS of the laptop.
Once the CD drive is the first boot device, insert the Windows ME Boot CD that you made and boot up. Be patient, as it will take longer to load the boot disk from CD than from floppy.
Finally, once it has loaded you will just install Windows 98 as you normally would, or FDisk or whatever you need to do.

Note: In my experience using a CD to boot takes much much longer than the floppy, be patient. The first time I tried this I almost gave up thinking it wouldn't work, but it eventually loaded the boot disk. The install seemed to take a lot longer than usual too, but it may just be that I'm used to my main comp flying through XP install in about 20 minutes and I was installing 98 on a 350mhz box with 64mb Ram.

[halseyca]

I will try to find the HDD adapter cable here in Australia if I can't make the Win ME boot CD work.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will update when I get the CD burned.

[halseyca]

Still getting same error message. BIOS is set to CD, A, C. I hear the CD spin up to speed, but does not load it.

Not sure what to do next...

[Murf]

Read THIS (http://www.bootdisk.com/nero.htm)

[halseyca]

Thanks for the suggestions. I did successfully burn a bootable CD. Unfortunately, it did not help boot the laptop, same result. I am thinking there are no CD drivers...

Next step????

[halseyca]

OK, so I pulled the HDD and CD drives out of their bays, blew some air through them, waved a magic wand and I can get the boot disk to work.

I cannot do sys c: because there is no OS on C. I will try to run setup if I can find a Win98 CD.