Thinkpads Forum

Hi

I have acquired a previously-owned 560z with W98 installed.
I like to re-install o/s occasionally on all my machines and balk at the prospect of shovelling in dozens of floppies - assuming they're even available.
If I purchased a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, could I boot from it?
Or would I need to boot from a floppy which had the appropriate PCMCIA drivers on it and go from there?
There must be someone out there who's done this...

Thanks
John

I can't speak specifically to your TP but I discovered when trying to do something similar on my 760XD that the PCMCIA slots are supported only after Windows has loaded. I don't believe they are seen by DOS.
If you were to create a Ghost image of an OS installation CD as a "partition image" you could load it via the LPT1 port from an external PC by means of the "para-link" software Ghost includes. At that point I believe you could boot from a floppy and navigate to the folder you placed the OS into and install from there. You would need to partition your TP hardrive to allow a C: (which you leave empty) and D: (that you place the OS installation on) before the para-link transfer.

Network boot disks work wonders... look for 'barts network boot disk' online, it'll work with PCMCIA cards fine, and you can install windows over a shared winNT (2k/xp) cd drive. [censored] easy for what it does too.

A parallel port CD ROM drive can be easily recognized by DOS. That's how I've done it with my 365X, which doesn't even have a CD ROM.

EDIT: I don't think you can boot from a parallel port CD, but you don't need to. First, make a WIN98 start-up floppy from your current system. Then, when it's time to re-install WIN98, you can do everything from the DOS prompt (with the parallel port CD ROM and its DOS drivers).

I have seen instructions for loading PC Card (PCMIA) drivers under DOS, but it looks really nasty.