Operating system not found.

[BJS]

Well I'll be the odd ball and say that I like having '98 on my laptop very few of the spywares work there and the hackers are't trying to exploit the holes,

For win95 you do need a boot disk, actually a dos boot disk w/ generic cd drivers works best. Most win95 cds are not bootable.


bigred- you can't email boot disk info it's not the size but where it is actually written on the disk.

Crumm- What OS is on the laptop? Do you have a floppy for your laptop? You may be able to make your own boot disk if you have a floppy. Which is what you will need to boot the computer.

If you would like I can make a boot disk for you and mail it to you but as you know USPS will take its dear sweet time getting it up to you, but it is somthing that a couple stamps will be able to get you.

 

[Roland_Jenkins]

Not true roland. All you have to do is set the bios to boot from CD.

What are the specs on the computer? If you can run XP I would recommend going that way.

In order to allow the installation of CD-ROM-based operating systems, you must be able to access your CD-ROM drive. This requires two pieces of software: a CD-ROM driver and the file system extension MSCDEX.EXE that comes with the operating system you are using. Make sure both are included and that the driver is loaded in the CONFIG.SYS system file and MSCDEX.EXE in the AUTOEXEC.BAT system file.

If your hard drive is "completely clean" their is no secret partition nor CD ROM driver. Sounds like you guys got it handled, I'll stay out of this one.

 

[Max Power]

Sorry Roland you are not correct. The Windows XP CD is bootable without any access to the hard drive at all. I've done it many, many, many times.

 

[Dieselmeister]

In order to allow the installation of CD-ROM-based operating systems, you must be able to access your CD-ROM drive. This requires two pieces of software: a CD-ROM driver and the file system extension MSCDEX.EXE that comes with the operating system you are using. Make sure both are included and that the driver is loaded in the CONFIG.SYS system file and MSCDEX.EXE in the AUTOEXEC.BAT system file.

If your hard drive is "completely clean" their is no secret partition nor CD ROM driver. Sounds like you guys got it handled, I'll stay out of this one.

Roland,

As someone else has stated the newer MB's allow you to boot from a CD-rom... Your older computers needed an OS with drivers loaded.

Some people say the hard drive is completely clean when really only the active partition that boots is. HP, Compaq, Toshiba... all have a proprietary "System Console" that you can go into and restore your computer back to the same way it came from the factory. I was just giving him something to look for because it will save him a lot of time if the machine has something like this.

If the computer is an older computer that requires a OS and cd drivers then the win98 startup disk zip file I linked to will allow you to boot the computer with cd-rom support... The make a bootable floppy using WinXp just go into explorer and click on the floppy drive. Right mouse click and Format the disk.

It will have a checkbox to format the floppy as a MS-DOS startup disk. make sure you check that. Once its done formating, go view it in explorer. Delete everything on it.

Now extract the zip file to the A: drive and overwrite everything. When its done you will now have a fully bootable Win98 disk.

Fdisk will allow you to see the hard drive and any partitions on it. The one thing that this disk does that I don't like is it creates a ram drive and loads some extra tools over on it...

I also have a win98se ISO that I could send you... all zipped up it's right around 550MB ...

 

[Crumm]

Thanks for the replies even though half of it is foreign to me . The wife talked to them at work and they are suppose to send the disks that came with the computer. There is a sticker on the front of it that says windows 2000 so I am hoping all that is needed will be sent. The disks are in Denver so it will be a bit until they get here. Once they arrive I will reply back here with the rest of my silly questions on how to load them. Thanks again..

 

[Dieselmeister]

Win 2000 is like Win XP with a different interface.

If it was Win 2000 you should be able to boot from the CD and run the setup program from it.

 

[Max Power]

With Win 2000 you have to create floppy start up disks as far as I've seen. Perhaps there are different revisions. However if they are machiane specific they probably are bootable cd's. I've seen manufacturer use norton ghost to restore images on hard drives from cd's as well.

 

[Crumm]

The disks will be here in a few days so we will see.

I was watching TV last night and saw an add for Dell so I went to there web site. I spec'd out a computer and when I went to the checkout they wanted $168 to ship it to Alaska when there add says "free shipping". I hit the exit and decided to wait on the disks. If they don't work I am going to get a new computer at Sam's club. In the mean time if I disappear for a while it means that the screen on this old laptop finally went blank for good.