Ok, this is bugging the bejeepers out of me. I feel like something so simple should not be challenging me this way, and getting to feel a little retarded lately, but I need some help to figure out what I’m doing wrong here.
I have a fine little cable that will plug into any IDE or SATA hdd and allow you to run it to the USB. The whole point of this cable is to be able to install a basic OS, like DOS, onto a laptop hard drive so that I can boot the laptop into something.
The laptop in question is older than dirt, and has no CD or Floppy attached to it. It’s an old Compaq Armada M200, missing the base which holds the modular drives. It has no OS on the disk, or anything else for that matter. It does have a USB port, however, it will not recognize anything plugged into it at this point because the BIOS is so old that it has no support for USB. This leaves me one option. Get something onto that hard drive using one of my other computers that will allow that hdd to boot up. My original plan was to make a tiny little partition, install DOS, and then drop the Win XP setup files (checked the requirements, and yes, it will BARELY support XP, but that’s what the person wants on the computer, even when I told them it would be slow, so that’s what they’re getting). From there, I was going to boot into DOS, then run the Win XP setup through the command line interface. I just haven’t been able to find the proper documentation anywhere to tell me how to get DOS loaded onto the sucker in a way that’s bootable.
If there’s anyone out there that can tell me if my plan will work, if there’s a better way, or give me a little direction, I would greatly appreciate it. And please, make your answer as step-by-step as possible. I’ve been having a difficult time with this, and it’s driving me nuts.
Thanks!
Mike
