I'm a computer technician and I have done this many times. I checked the hdd for errors and it's clean. I also tried this with a windows 2000 CD, running winnt.exe from the i386 folder but this too failed on the first reboot, saying it couldn't find NTLDR. (I tried it a few times, from a subdirectory and from the root of the hd). This time the installation halted at about 6-9% with a read error.
Then I put it back in the laptop and ran setup.exe. Next I tried putting the laptop's hdd in a pc with a cd drive, then running the setup CD until the first reboot (when it copies all the necessary files to the hdd), I then put the hdd drive back in the laptop and tried to continue setup but it didn't work either.įinally I tried again putting the laptop hdd in a pc with a cd drive, installed dos, then copied the contents of the setup cd to the hdd. It's been a while so I don't really remember what error I got though, I'll try it again when I get the chance. I've tried a few options but nothing worked and I'm out of ideas.įirst I tried installing the plop boot manager to the MBR of the laptop's hard drive from another PC, and then using it to boot from usb (I prepared a bootable USB stick with windows 98 setup on it) but it didn't work. I'm trying to install windows 98se on an old laptop that doesn't have an optical drive, floppy drive or USB boot (it does have one USB port).