installing win 2000 without cd drive

[corosus]

hi
i am looking at a IBM portable (e600) with a 400 mhrz procesor) it has win 98SE and a pcmcia-NIC. it does not have a cd drive. is thereanny way i could use the nic to install win 2k using the network???????

[EzyStvy]

Can yank the drive out.
Get one of those $7.00 converters and connect it to a desktop pc.

Format
Copy the cd to the dive and put it back in the lappy.

[corosus]

could i not just coppy the cd to the drive over the lan (without having to mess about with portable hardware)??

[glc]

Create a dedicated partition on the hard drive to copy the CD onto. Boot with a Win98 startup disk and go to the \i386 directory of the CD files and run WINNT.EXE.

[corosus]

Originally Posted by glc Create a dedicated partition on the hard drive

the pc hads one (1) partition on the hd, that fills the entire hd, can i repartition the hd with the os installed on it? i mea is it safe, and what could i do to make it safer, i assume defragging the drive??
i have partition magic 8.0 i assume that's the right tool for the job?

[Doobie]

Originally Posted by corosus the pc hads one (1) partition on the hd, that fills the entire hd, can i repartition the hd with the os installed on it? i mea is it safe, and what could i do to make it safer, i assume defragging the drive?? i have partition magic 8.0 i assume that's the right tool for the job?

You could use partition magic to make a new partition then just copy files from windows. Do you have a windows xp cd around? If so you could make a bartPE cd and boot from the cd and format the harddrive from there and then copy files via lan.

google BartPE

[corosus]

i can not boot from cd, because there is no cd drive ( well there is one but it does not work and it's not needed in the use of this notebook )

[Mesaeus]

Shamelessly stealing (ahem, borrowing...) tips from glc and Doobie , I think your best bet is to use PM 8.0 to first resize the current partition to something smaller (make enough free space first). You can then either make a new FAT32 partition in the unpartitioned space and format it, so you can transfer the files over network to the new partition (after a format ofcourse) like glc said, and start WINNT.exe. Or you can just skip creating the new partition, just copy the w2000 files to a directory on your first partition and start WINNT.exe there, and let the W2000 setup create the new partition in the unpartitioned space. It all depends on where you want to put the W2000 installation files.

[corosus]

if i put the cd-files on the same partition as where i want to install the OS won't i get into trouble (because the win2k installer will want to format the drive)?????

[tacoeater]

i like glc's suggestion best:
Create a dedicated partition on the hard drive to copy the CD onto. Boot with a Win98 startup disk and go to the \i386 directory of the CD files and run WINNT.EXE.
you will format it fat32. later, if succesful you can convert to NTFS.
I don't think 2k will want to format, other choices probably like with XP.
MY QUESTION is this:
with XP all you have to copy to the hard drive is the i386 directory off of the cd. then you run winnt.exe from the directory on the hard drive where you copied the i386 folder contents. is this all you need on the hard drive or do you actually need the whole cd with win2k?
of course you would need that $7 adapter that was mentioned above by EZYSTVY.

[glc]

No, you dont need the adapter. You can dump the CD across the lan. A dedicated partition is the only way to go if you want to reformat the C drive and install 2000 clean, which is the best way. You can always use PM again to get rid of the partition and stretch C back out after the fact - or you can just leave it be in case something happens and you have to reinstall 2K over the top. It's prolly best to dump the whole CD - it's less than 500 megs. You might want to slipstream it with SP4 before you dump it.

You can run PM from the emergency boot disks if you don't want to actually install it on the hard drive.

[corosus]

i created the partition ( now win 98 is slightly messed up- wrong icons and such- but what the hell) . ill post back if it worked.

[corosus]

hurray, it worked but now i got a bootmenu between win 2k an 98SE (witch won't boot because it can't handle the NTFS filesystem). is there an easy way to get rid of this or do i need to do a format and a re-install???