Conversation

Alice Averlong🏳️‍⚧️

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?

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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?

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so probably I copy over something that'll let me null-modem the serial to my main laptop

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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

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@moftasa it can't boot off USB, so I'd need to move something via floppy that can talk USB

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@foone I wonder if 10 diskettes are really slower than a USB 1 CDROM

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@pjakobs it has a REALLY SLOW floppy drive

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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.

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@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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󠀁󠁔󠁨󠁥󠀠󠁭󠁯󠁳󠁴󠀠󠁡tecteun

@foone can't you just take out the hdd and dd an image?

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@tecteun don't have the correct adapters handy, it's using a 44pin IDE hard drive

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did my USB floppy drive just die on me?!

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I'll have to switch to one of my many other USB floppy drives.

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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

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@emily I have honestly considered it

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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!

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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!

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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

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COMPUTERS ARE FUN
28 year old laptops even moreso

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@foone only ten disks? Tell me you've never installed Microsoft Office from floppies without telling me, etc :-)

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@kw217 I have been looking for a copy of that office installer, I'd love to do it, maybe on video?

I'm just annoyed with doing lots of disks because this laptop has a very slow floppy drive

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@foone CDROMs were a *massive* advance for software installation

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I finally finished installing DOS 6.22 onto it

and then the hard drive failed

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I think I have a CF to 44pin IDE adapter somewhere

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@Tamber that's the only kind of computer I work with, yeah

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alice! hey alice.
future alice listen to me: when you do set up the CF to 44pin thing, partition and format it using the DOS disk in the laptop, then remove it again connect it to your laptop and just copy over windows 98 or whatever. don't deal with serial or floppies

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@foone i know the USB is the obvious option and the parallel can be doable too with some hyperterm fuckery, but have you considered a PCMCIA hard drive?
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@miifox that'd work, if I could get my hands on my PCMCIA cards, but I don't have an easy way to write to it on the other end. my thinkpad doesn't exactly have a PCMCIA/cardbus slot anymore

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@foone @miifox there are pcmcia to CF adapters (I know since I use one for my Amiga 600), just need a CF to USB for the other end (which should be an option on most multicard readers)

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