No floppy drive!

[fitzy16]

Hi all, I hope somebody here can point me in the right direction.
Somebody gave me an old Toshiba satellite pro410cdt laptop.
Its got 1 gig hardrive and the fella who gave it me has put winME on it. Because of that, there is only 140 mb left. What I wanted to do was format it and put win95 on it but it has no floppy drive for the bootup disc but it has a cdrom drive that I can install win95 on.
Any ideas of how to go about this?

[FalcomPSX]

you probably need some sort of external floppy, either parrallel or USB or something like that.

[OuTpaTienT]

If you want to nuke WinME and put on 95 or 98 instead, then I'd do this:

- Copy the install files for 95/98 from a CD Rom to a directory on the hard drive.

- Boot to a command prompt only.

- Then just delete everything from the hard drive except for the directory with your install files. Also don't delete io.sys & command.com which should be in the root of C:\.

- Then goto your directory of install files and run setup.

That should work. Or at least that's what I would try. I'd make it work one way or another (there's always a way). Someone will probably have better advice though, so don't jump on it yet.

[ZENYO]

If you have access to a burner you can make a boot cd.

[TOAD6147]

"- Boot to a command prompt only.."

He can't get to a command prompt in Me without a startup diskette and he has no floppy drive so that won't work. ZENYO's suggestion would probably work if his BIOS would allow him to boot from the CD-ROM but at 1 GB of hdd space sounds like it may be too old to allow that. Only two things I can think of is an external floppy (or one that will dock where the CD-ROM is if it allows that) or take out the hdd and hook it to another machine, copy the boot files that you need as well your CD-ROM drivers so that DOS will find it. That's the only way I can see how to get there from here w/o a DOS bootable drive.

[ZENYO]

If the bios will allow you to boot of the cd, you probably wouldn't have to burn a bootable cd. I think the windows cd itself is bootable.

[TOAD6147]

"I think the windows cd itself is bootable."

Some are, some aren't. It just depends. I can boot from my Win98 CD but not my Win Me. Go figure. And I doubt they made Win95 CD's bootable at all.

[fitzy16]

Thanks for all the replies. As it all seems to be getting a little out of my depth, I think I`ll borow an external floppy off someone and do it from there, unless someone has other ideas

[OuTpaTienT]

If borrowing & connecting a floppy drive is feasible then that's most likely going to be your best and easiest option. Especially if some of this other talk is getting out of the realm of what you are comfortable doing.

[thekemp]

Find a similar machine and put the hard drive in it then install win 95 to the point where it has finnished copying files and when it says ''restarting'' shut the machine down and transfer the hard disk back there it will detect plug and play etc for the machine you want 95 on.
good luck