560E - Reinstall 98E without internal CDrom diskette

[djdave]

Hello
I've got an old Thinkpad 560E (2GB) without diskette and cdrom-internal.
I managed to connect an external cdrom reader Freecom so to work and burn CDs
But now I'd like to format everything and start again from scratch (I have Win98 cdrom).
How can i install Win98 from DOS so that My Freecom device is recognized and that I can install everything.
Or maybe there exist other ways ?
Thx
Dave

[farna]

Does the Freecom use a PCMCIA card or is it a USB device? Before you format the drive, got to control panel and make a Win98 boot floppy. Boot with that and CD-ROM support. See if your Freecom drive is recognized. If it is pop in the CD and run setup. If not, the drivers for the Freecom surely had to have come on floppy discs and not a CD (how o you load drivers from a CD is you only have an external CD that you just bought?). Try loading the drivers while you're in the floppy boot mode. They need to be loaded on the floppy. If space is a problem you can delete a couple things on the floppy. You can move all utils onto another floppy and delete the RAM drive stuff from the boot floppy if necessary. You might have to swap floppies around a bit when booting, but that's not to much trouble. You may also have to edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys files.

The only other thing I can think of is to load as late a version of MS-DOS as you can find (6.x) IF you have MS-DOS drivers for the Freecom drive. If you don't have a copy of MS-DOS around search the net for FreeDOS, which is compatible.

[Nolonemo]

If I understand your post, you have a 560E that will boot to some OS, and that the machine recognizes your CD drive, but you do not have a floppy drive.

If your OS is DOS, you should be able to copy the Win98 CD to a directory on the C: drive (as I recall, all you need to copy is the contents of the Win98 directory on the CD which is around 180MB, you don't neeed to copy the extras on the CD) and then navigate to that directory and run SETUP from the dos prompt. Then you can delete any old directories on the machine (but I would keep the Win98 CD directory on the machine, because some hardware installs require you to access the Win98 setup CD).

I had to use this method on my 560x (though I had a floppy disk I could use to get the HD bootable), because I had a PC Card CD drive. I could start the Win98 install from the CD, but when windows rebooted as part of the install, it would no longer recognize the drive, so the install would fail.

If you have Win 3.1 or Win95 on the machine, use the same method, Win98 should do an upgrade install in that case.

Hope this addresses your situation.