[Fllash]

Alrighty. Howdy

Now, i recently aquired an ancient artifact! (AKA the Compaq Armada 1700 Lappy)

Its specs are as follows:

CPU: Pentium II 233MHZ
RAM: 32MB
HDD: 4GB
Has a CD-ROM drive, but i cant get into the bios to change the booting order. I can only boot of the Inbuilt Floppy Drive.

Thats all that i think is relevent.

So as soon as i could, i plugged it in powered it on, and was pleased to find that it started booting. Windows 2000. But at 2 bars from booting up, it froze, the hard drive was making weired noises and i eventually gave up waiting and switched it off.
I was disgruntled when i next turned it on, it made that same weired hard drive noise almost straight away. So it seems to have given up the ghost. I like a good challenge, and what my goal is, is for it to boot into some os other than 3.1, preferable windows 95 because of the insanely low requirements.

As the hard drive is as good as dead to me, i set out attempting to get my USB Hard drive to host the OS. The boot disk was the windows 95 setup disk.
I got the Panasonic USBASPI.sys driver, and set the paramiters in config.sys. It booted of A:/, and recognised the 1 gig partition i had just created in partition magic and formatted as FAT16. I was able to perform all dos related functions available. I then removed my usb hard drive and plugged it into my main Computer. I copied the contents of the 95 setup disk to a folder on the drive, and re connected it to the Lappy. I booted off the floppy, and navigated to the setup files. I was very pleased when i was able to enter all the details and start installing. It reached the end without a hitch. It said "remove all disketts and press OK to restart your computer". So i did, but i left the boot disk in as i needed it to access the USB partition i had just installed 95 to. So it booted, and i again navigated to the USB partition. Now so far i have only tried running command.com, as i have not once needed to do something this dosss-ey with an OS like 95. So, firstly:

Is it possible to get 95 to start from the command line? The USB partition is read as C:, so i cant see why not.

What exe(s), or bat(s) do i need to run to start loading 95. I have the dos portion of the bootup sequence done, i dont know what to do now.

Sorry bout all that, its a little garbled.

If you have an inkling of what i could do, any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Josh.

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[Neil Jones]

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[Fllash]

Hey, thanks for the reply. I tried doing that with my boot disk an MS-DOS 7.22 one. An error message said i couldent run win.exe with anything older than a MS-DOS 7 bootdisk, so i made an XP one and tried that. I got a couple or errors about registry and a VFAT error (havent seen one of them in ages (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/139063). Well, ill try installing 98 then. Any help is, i remind you, greatfully accepted .

Anyway, Thanks so far,

Josh.