cant install an OS on a laptop - help needed.

[paolow]

can anyone help me? ive got a fairly old compaq armada that has 128 meg of ram and a 650 intel 3 chip and im trying to get windows onto it. it will only boot from 98 - not xp but even when it does - i get read errors on my cd that i know to be in perfect cond. if i try the 6 xp boot floppies i get read errors and if i boot with cdrom support from a 98 floppy im told that xp cant run in dos. the furthest i can get is with 98 but i get constant errors in installation and in the end it just gives up. im really stuck! ive reset my bios and the sys seems sound, but for these damn errors that are blocking my every move! have any of you got any ideas?
many thanks

ok - update - im pretty sure the problem stems from missing or incompatible drivers. if so - is there a way i can force the installation of the correct drivers from a boot disk?

>>> Edited by paolow on Wednesday 24th March 18:56

[warmfuzzies]

Do you have an O/S on teh laptop?

When I encountered this I used laplink, joined the two p.c's together on parallel cable and did a dump of all the files on the install disk to a seperate folder on my old laptop (it didn't have a cd belive it or not)then ran the setup from the folder on the laptop.
I was only going to ME so YMMV depending upon O/S.

Kevin

oh and 600MB and parallel cable = eternity......

[Liszt]

may need to update bios of laptop, not just reset it.

Tried creating a win98 boot disk then when you get to the a: prompt copy cd to hd.. Then find the i386 and run winnt.exe

[paolow]

theres no os currently on the laptop - i scrubbed it thoroughly and havent even managed to format it correctly back to either ntfs or fat32. also - irritatingly i can see the i386 dir when i inspect teh cdrom but it wont let me look in the folder. *sigh* the furthest ive got at the mo is to have a c: thats unformatted, a d: thats my ramdrive and an e: thats my cdrom, but after that i get crashes or invalied drives or move errors

[gizard]

Sounds like the CDROM driver laser might need adjusting.

[stuh]

paolow said:

theres no os currently on the laptop - i scrubbed it thoroughly and havent even managed to format it correctly back to either ntfs or fat32. also - irritatingly i can see the i386 dir when i inspect teh cdrom but it wont let me look in the folder. *sigh* the furthest ive got at the mo is to have a c: thats unformatted, a d: thats my ramdrive and an e: thats my cdrom, but after that i get crashes or invalied drives or move errors

Presumably if you can see an i386 folder on the disk then you still have a file system of some type?

My advise would be to do a fdisk with the /mbr switch to remove any possibly corrupt master boot record. Then create a FAT (not FAT32) partition. Boot from a dos floppy, format the c: drive and run sys c: - this will give you the basic command.com on your laptop.

Old cdrom drivers can be flaky, so if you serach the web you should be able to find a generic atapi driver (if not i can mail you one) which will give you access to your cd-rom drive...............

[andyf007]

Do the BIOS update first, but, if it still gives errors, check for faulty memory?

If the errors are those that give the message about file copying and check the CDrom, these occur with NT, 2K, and XP and indicate a memory fault, not a CD fault. Windows 98 gives something similar during it's file copying phase.

Andy

[paolow]

whew - thanks for all the input everyone, ive now got xp onto it but what a battle! FDISK crashed the laptop constantly so in the end i did as stu suggested and did a fresh C: format using a ramdrive created by a 98 bootdisk. when this was done i got halfway through 98 before it fell over.
I cleaned the laser and the disk but in the end I had to track down another copy of 98 before it would install completely. it would seem therefore that the laser is grouchy as hell and/or the generic drivers dont quite agree with it. (so you were right as well guy).
in fact playing with it now it wont take burned cds at all so a good thing my originals are i good nick! probably just a dated drive being a nuisance more than anything - but im not touching a laptop again!

thanks again for all your help

Paolo