The "how to" of optical free notebooks. Ideas??

[DukeP]

The Ibm X series.

Lovely, arent they?

But No Cd-rom drive.
No diskette drive.

And I need to install either Mandrake, Feodora or WinXP on it.

And it would be preffereable, if I could wipe the (one) partition on it at get go.

How?

I can access it over the network. I have acces to an intranet ftp and a windows share.

I have:
The Mandrake 10.0 3cd set.
The Feodora -ditto-
A winXp Pro cd.

Lots of tcp/ip cable.


Suggestions (Or better Software!) welcome.


~~DukeP~~

[VJ]

I take it external drives (USB flash drives, USB/Firewire cdrom, ...) are out of the question ?

What is currently installed ? (as you need to boot from *something*)

Linux has networkinstallation (but IIRC, they require special boot floppies ).

You can perhaps copy the CD of the OS you want to install to the local harddisk, mount it as a CDrom, and start the install procedure from there...


Jörg

[DukeP]

Hey VJ.

Well, Im leaning towards getting an external drive bay, just "get it over".

Currently the machine runs a halfdead (but functioning) Win2k.

Problem with mounting a cd image, is that I really want to format the harddrive.

Argh..

~~DukeP~~

[Rob(QG)]

What about removing the hard drive and connecting it to another PC/laptop with a USB caddy?

You could create a small bootable partition that would allow you to do the install over a network.

[spadnos]

How about LoadLin?

I'm not sure exactly what the bootstrap process will be, but this may be a good starting point.

- Steve

edit: oops - apparently only works with DOS / Win95 (/98/me). Sorry.

[Ribbit]

Take the hard drive out, and use a small magnet to carefully arrange the bits correctly....

Seriously though, unless you can get it to boot from the network and can figure how to install an OS from a network boot, I think you're forced to get an external drive (make sure you can boot from it!).

Edit: Perhaps there's a Windows program which will modify your boot sector so you can boot from the network (a Windows installer for GRUB or PXELinux, perhaps?), but it would be soooooooo easy to screw up the machine.....

Edit2: Scratch what I said about PXELinux, it's not what I thought it was. And there doesn't appear to be a way to install GRUB from Windows. Sorry....

[DukeP]

Thanks for all your ideas.

What I need is a system that allows me to:
1) be installable from a win2k client.
2) boot and initialise some kind of network connection, be that ftp or otherwise.
3) Survive "in ram" so the harddisc can be formatted.

Ehm.
I think I did all of this once using netbios. But thats a looooong time ago...

~~DukeP~~

[Rakido]

I would second Rob's suggestion.

Format the hd in your pc and put the contents of a network boot disk on it, that should do it. A good one is here: http://www.nu2.nu/bootdisk/network/


Rakido

[DukeP]

Hey Rakido.
Will try!

Looks good.

~~DukeP~~

[High_Jumbllama]

Don't forget a nice <a href="http://www.alcohol-soft.com" target ="_blank">virtual CD-ROM program</a> for afterwards for apps and games.

[VJ]

This looks like an interesting product:

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0404/04042601iomega7in1plusfloppy.asp

(usb floppy + cardreader)

Not sure if it is bootable, nor what the quality of the device is, nor if the cardslots are accessible from DOS...


Jörg

[DukeP]

Its an interesting subject.

Turned out that there existet a hidden partition on the notebok, which had some booting tools and a preinstall of win2k.

Didnt have the time to mess with it bigtime, so just used the recovery funtions.

Worked like a charm.

NO clue if they can be updated to encompass win xp or linux.
:shrug:

~~DukeP~~

[VJ]

Yes, that is common on IBMs... (we have a T21 that has that very same pre-installed thingy). Downside is it uses harddiskspace... (I somehow thought you had cleared this hidden partition... :-)) As for updating it, I doubt it...
(I prefer the Toshiba approach: you get the CDs from which you can boot and get a Windows installation as if the laptop just came from the store).


Jörg

[Dilitante1]

well you can always use one of these to transfer data/prep drive

http://www.a1computerstuff.com/adplapdrv.html