Floppy Only Install (No Netcard, Windows Required)

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I'm still blown away that I was actually able to do what I was planning on doing...

I'll explain... I have a very old laptop that a buddy of mine was gave to me, its a 75Mhz Pentium (classic) 16 Megs RAM, 540MB harddrive, no CD ROM or USB available, 10/100 Kingston KNE-2 PCMCIA card, the only info online I could find about it was (FCC ID:FMA7600)... I truly thought I was fighting a futile battle but now im surfing the web on this little monster!

OK before I go into how I did it I want to let anyone know that before they get frustrated and throw it out of the window take a step back and catch your breath...many times I wanted to quit but kept on trying...

HERE GOES:

1. Get the ISO image from DOWNLOAD PAGE

2. Get your favorite ISO viewer program (ISOBUSTER, DAEMON TOOLS, or whatever)

3. Extract the ISO files to your harddrive:

        index.html
        autorun.inf
        autorun.bat
        KNOPPIX [DIR]

4. Get WINRAR and UnRAR for DOS files.

  • Info: You should use on both the DOS-Version, else the file-headers aren't readable.

5. When you rar the files you will have to go into the adv tab and select the old archive names (otherwise you get filenames like unrar.part01.rar which will confuse DOS), dont worry about compression or whatnot it should handle that automatically. Once you rar the files you should have around 30-32 rar files that will fit on a floppy.

5. With a WIN98 WIN98(no ramdrive) boot floppy (dont worry about the error message about no cdrom) fdisk 2 (50meg) primary fat 32 paritions on the harddrive (dont worry about the extra space...Linux will handle that later).

Format them (C:\ and D:\) with

        format C: /u 
        format D: /u

6. Using 2 "good" floppies copy over the individual rar files to the D: drive on the computer

        a:\copy *.* d:

once you have all the files copied over we need to:

A: check the integrity of the files and

B: extract the files back to thier original state.

        unrar t unrar.rar