Thinkpads Forum

Any ideas? I have a floppy drive, yuck. How about a hard drive swap and install with my other notebooks. Any dangers doing this? Any better suggestions. Does have ethernet port.

fr0zenmon wrote:How about a hard drive swap and install with my other notebooks.

If it's Win98SE or earlier, yes, that would work. There are other ways, but this might be the simplest.

what do you mean? which machine needs win98se

fr0zenmon wrote:what do you mean? which machine needs win98se

I meant "If you are installing Win98SE or an earlier operating system". Besides installing Win98SE, you should also copy the entire "Win98" folder from the CD to the HDD. Then transfer the HDD back to the 770ED and power up the laptop. Because it's a "new" machine, Win98SE will detect lots of new hardware and install new drivers. It might ask you for the location of the Windows 98SE CD; just tell it to go to C:\Win98.

fr0zenmon wrote:How about a hard drive swap and install with my other notebooks.

Maybe this is what you meant, but just to be sure, I would say sure, you could use your 600E to format the drive and copy the necessary CAB files over to the drive, but at that point, you should swap the drive back into your 770ED and then run the appropriate Windows setup routine from there.

Also, some people recommend formatting drives only in the system in which you are going to use them: so you should use your floppy disk to boot up and fdisk/format your hard drive before you move it to another system to copy the files onto it.

Phil.

pkiff wrote:I would say sure, you could use your 600E to format the drive and copy the necessary CAB files over to the drive, but at that point, you should swap the drive back into your 770ED and then run the appropriate Windows setup routine from there.

That's closer to how I normally do it, but I wasn't sure whether the OP would be familiar with typing commands (FORMAT, XCOPY, MD, etc.) at the DOS prompt. What I suggested avoids that.