Feel my pain. Below is the story… and links to the tools and info that led to victory!
Tatsumi has a great family, and her Dad gave me a laptop they weren’t using, an old IBM Thinkpad. Good deal, except it had Win98 on it. Ok, I think, I’ll put XP on it…
- So I run the compatibility check, and it all looks good!
- Reboot the system with the WinXP disc in and I get… Win98
- Find out that the external CD drive hooked up to the PCMCIA IDE card is not bootable.
- Whip out my hand DOS boot disk of wonder and fire that puppy up! No go. The CD is sufficiantly whacky that that won’t work.
- Download and try almost every conceivable flobby boot disk on the net (links below)
- Nope.
Now I am frustrated. Fine, I can’t boot from the CD-ROM. I’ll do something else… hey, I’ll install from the network!
- Connect to a Windows 2K3 based server from DOS mode? Especially if it has a too long to be backwards compatible domain name?
- No, no I won’t.
So finally I did the sensible thing, and built all six of the floppies it takes to do a floppy based Windows XP install. Success!
Anyway, here are the links to the cool boot floppy and CD-ROM tools: