so I need to install DOS, windows 3.1, Print Shop Deluxe III, and a printer driver onto this Pentium II laptop.
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@foone Shot in the dark, but would Plop Boot Manager work? I think it might be possible to chainload USB with it.
@kewliomzx I don't think so, because the BIOS doesn't know how to talk to a USB storage device at all. and I think plop would just be able to chainload to any device the BIOS can talk to
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@foone can't you just take out the hdd and dd an image?
@tecteun don't have the correct adapters handy, it's using a 44pin IDE hard drive
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so I need to install DOS, windows 3.1, Print Shop Deluxe III, and a printer driver onto this Pentium II laptop.
Difficulty: The system has a dead CD-ROM drive. It does have a floppy drive, however... but that's a lot to move via floppy.
It's a win98-era laptop. It has USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, dual PCMCIA slots, floppy, DVD (broken), and a docking connector.
So now my challenge is: How do I get this software onto the machine without having to slowly write something like 10 floppy disks?
@foone If you have the kit -
* Parallel port hard-drive or cdrom
* PCMCIA SCSI cdrom
* Remove the disk, mount it on another machine and dump the install files on there, put it back in the laptop, mount the disk and run the install process -
if I had access to my PCMCIA cards I could plug in an ethernet card and network stuff over.
but I don't
@foone Check the BIOS of the machine; You might be able to tell it to expose USB Mass Storage devices as Hard Drives. If you can, then you should be able to plug in a thumb drive with your files on it before booting, assuming you have DOS installed already.
Otherwise, https://bretjohnson.us/ exists as well, which is USB Drivers for DOS.
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if I had access to my PCMCIA cards I could plug in an ethernet card and network stuff over.
but I don't
@foone there’s probably a ”linux on a couple of diskettes” thing you can use
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I don't know if there's any software I could install that'd let me use the USB ports.
well, any software short of Win98. I'd love to have win98 on here, but HOW DO IT GET IT OVER THERE?
@foone there is a USB stack for DOS. Also, KolibriOS has a USB stack that should be supported. Either are going to be just one floppy
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so I need to install DOS, windows 3.1, Print Shop Deluxe III, and a printer driver onto this Pentium II laptop.
Difficulty: The system has a dead CD-ROM drive. It does have a floppy drive, however... but that's a lot to move via floppy.
It's a win98-era laptop. It has USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, dual PCMCIA slots, floppy, DVD (broken), and a docking connector.
So now my challenge is: How do I get this software onto the machine without having to slowly write something like 10 floppy disks?
@foone the old DOS versions of Laplink or clones thereof were good for that purpose.
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@pjakobs it has a REALLY SLOW floppy drive
@foone but as slow as 12MBit/s?
hmm... 12Mbit/s is a raw 1.5MByte/s - that's at least more raw bandwith. A 1x CDROM does 300kByte/s so you would be able to run a 4x probably, yes, that should be faster than any floppy.
The things we used to put up with back then! -
I don't know if there's any software I could install that'd let me use the USB ports.
well, any software short of Win98. I'd love to have win98 on here, but HOW DO IT GET IT OVER THERE?
@foone freedos might do that, no?
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if I had access to my PCMCIA cards I could plug in an ethernet card and network stuff over.
but I don't
did my USB floppy drive just die on me?!
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I don't know if there's any software I could install that'd let me use the USB ports.
well, any software short of Win98. I'd love to have win98 on here, but HOW DO IT GET IT OVER THERE?
@foone ethernet pcmcia or cardbus card -
did my USB floppy drive just die on me?!
I'll have to switch to one of my many other USB floppy drives.
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I don't know if there's any software I could install that'd let me use the USB ports.
well, any software short of Win98. I'd love to have win98 on here, but HOW DO IT GET IT OVER THERE?
@foone alternatively use a large hard disk and just dump all the windows 98 install cd files into a directory on it. And then put it in the computer and run setup from dos -
so probably I copy over something that'll let me null-modem the serial to my main laptop
@foone back in the day we used norton commander in m/s mode to copy stuff via null modem. Not really fast but overnight you could whoop some megs.
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so I need to install DOS, windows 3.1, Print Shop Deluxe III, and a printer driver onto this Pentium II laptop.
Difficulty: The system has a dead CD-ROM drive. It does have a floppy drive, however... but that's a lot to move via floppy.
It's a win98-era laptop. It has USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, dual PCMCIA slots, floppy, DVD (broken), and a docking connector.
So now my challenge is: How do I get this software onto the machine without having to slowly write something like 10 floppy disks?
@foone usb device on computer A that emulates a ps/2 keyboard for computer B, stream keystrokes to it to type all the files into a hex editor
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@foone usb device on computer A that emulates a ps/2 keyboard for computer B, stream keystrokes to it to type all the files into a hex editor
@emily I have honestly considered it
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I'll have to switch to one of my many other USB floppy drives.
SO FUN FACT: if you let this machine spin down the hard drive (which it'll do as soon as there's 5 minutes of no activity), it can't spin it back up!
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SO FUN FACT: if you let this machine spin down the hard drive (which it'll do as soon as there's 5 minutes of no activity), it can't spin it back up!
so if you get delayed providing the requested Disk 2 of DOS 6.22 because your USB drive died, and it has to wait for over 5 minutes... the drive will spin down and not come back up.
so the installer will read the files off the drive and then completely fail to write them to the disk! and you have to start over again!
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SO FUN FACT: if you let this machine spin down the hard drive (which it'll do as soon as there's 5 minutes of no activity), it can't spin it back up!
@foone that sounds awful!
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so if you get delayed providing the requested Disk 2 of DOS 6.22 because your USB drive died, and it has to wait for over 5 minutes... the drive will spin down and not come back up.
so the installer will read the files off the drive and then completely fail to write them to the disk! and you have to start over again!
I fixed this setting in the BIOS but the CMOS battery is dead which means if you leave it powered off for more than like 30 seconds, it resets all the values and turns it back on for you
