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What can be used to boot an older computer?
I still rebuild, upgrade and use older computers. To get things started
on them, you need some sort of boot device. When you have the basic hardware, and want to install a hard drive, you first need to boot the machine to setup the hard drive. In the old days, you're stick a bootable DOS disk in the floppy drive, boot the puter and then run FDISK and next FORMAT the hard drive. I still run Win98se on several computers. Win98 can be installed from floppies too. But lets say there is no floppy drive. How do you boot them? If I'm not mistaken, you cant boot from a CD, because the CD cant be accessed without the computer being booted from DOS and running the driver to make the CD drive usable. And none of them old machines had the bios to make them boot from a USB flash drive. This sort of tells me that you MUST have a floppy drive to boot those old machines. But, are there other ways? I'm looking for ideas and suggestions for how to boot them *if* other methods do exist..... I just ran into this problem, because I wanted to replace my C: drive on an old machine running Win98. (with a bigger hard drive). All seemed fine, till I found out that my floppy drive had died. Using the existing hard drive, I was able to partition and format the new hard drive, but I was unable ot make it bootable. I finally just quit doing this HDD change until I was able to obtain a new floppy drive on ebay. Once I got that, I was back in business. (I have all the setup files for Win98 on a my present HDD, so I have never needed to install it from floppies in years. But now I face the installation of the new HDD. Once I boot from a floppy, if I copy all the install files to the new HDD (from the old one), will I be able to install Win98 from those files on the new HDD? -OR- I can plug in my slave drive, and have the Win98 install files on that slave drive.... Although this old computer has USB 1.1, I have never seen any way to access the USB from a Dos boot. Thanks for all advice! |
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What can be used to boot an older computer?
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#3
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What can be used to boot an older computer?
On Fri, 03 Nov 2017 18:03:35 -0400, Flasherly
wrote: contents of !go.bat 98SE, I'll hazard. |
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