Sharing a cd-rom?

Hey guys need a little help here, some of you might remember I had gotten a laptop and the guy sent it without windows 95 on it that he had promised would be with it. Well after some emailing he said he'd send me the windows 95 on floppy disks, well he send me windows 95 brand new but on a cd. So I wrote back and he said it was all he had and sorry etc etc.

I was wondering if anyone knows another way I could get windows installed such as using my desktop pc and connecting it to the laptop with a parallel port to use my desktops cd-rom or some other way. The laptops a old toshiba 486 with like 4mb of ram so finding a compatible external would be a pain, and a waste of money. Thanks for any help..

You might be able to copy the instalation from CD to floppy on your desktop. I would have to look into how you would go about this though.

I was looking into doing something with RIS and booting off the network but I think it would be too much.

Sorry, I am interested in knowing your solution once it is finished.

I've been reading up on it, and it is possible to copy cd to floppy however its going to take alot of floppy disks and alot of time, but that seems like the "easiest" solution right now. I'll let you know what works.

You have a few solution from here.


grab yourself a parallel cable or a null modem cable and transfer the whole windows installation files accross from one pc to the hard drive of the laptop
boot off a network card via the hardware or bootdisk (need a special one) and share the cdrom drive, and run install from there (there's a network boot disk somewhere on the net, done it quite successfully myself with the only catch it all has to be ms based, so no linux way to do this if using this boot disk).
install an external cd rom drive and load it up (can be a pain)
extract the hard drive from the laptop, put it into a pc with a cdrom drive (might need an extender so it fits on all 40 pins of the ide) and copy it accross there (installation files)
OR use a program such as arj, lha, rar, etc to compress the installation files to multiple floppies (will be slow and again a pain), though I use to do this back in the 486 days (well it was relatively small anyway).


HTH

Thanks Zeus, I'm going to try compressing it onto floppies first before I give up and try another method, I have about 40 new floppies laying around in their boxes still so it won't cost me anything to do it that way.

I had to do the same thing on my old laptop. Only problem was that it had no operating system on it at all or a CD-ROM, so it was a pain just getting it installed in the first place. Floppies worked for me. Win95 is small, so floppies should work. Just be glad he sent you Win95 on CD. Win95 on floppies is Win95-a, which is the most unstable of the bunch. You probably were sent Win95-b or Win95-c.

There's a folder on the cd called win95 or something like that, just look out for the files which have the setup.exe or something similar like that in it, and all the relavent files should be there.

For the NT series of operating system it is winnt.exe or .com, can't really remember as I only type winnt.

For the floppies you only need max 5, as one will compress on one pc, then you bring it over to the other pc and extract it. Guessing your using the compression pc in a multitasking environment, just delete the contents of the floppies once it finished extracting at the laptop.

I personally wouldn't bother with the floppies, I'd get myself a null cable or transfer via parallel port, its less hassel and you don't have to be there, just set it up and leave it, go out, watch a movie, by the time you come back its all done.

I had to do the same thing on my old laptop. Only problem was that it had no operating system on it at all or a CD-ROM, so it was a pain just getting it installed in the first place. Floppies worked for me. Win95 is small, so floppies should work. Just be glad he sent you Win95 on CD. Win95 on floppies is Win95-a, which is the most unstable of the bunch. You probably were sent Win95-b or Win95-c.

To tell you the truth I have had no troubles on any microsoft operating systems. I ran windows 95a on a 486 dx2 33 with 20 megs of ram (edo ram btw so they were nasty slow buggers). It ran perfect, no problems at all (cept slow).

I've ran windows 98 and 98 second edition on 686, amds k6/2 400, and even on p3's, stable as anything.

Basically with any operating system its all gotta do with house-keeping and ensure you install stable drivers, once that is done no problem.

I now run xp's and linux boxes' in my home network, they happily live and co-exist next to one another without any trouble.

To tell you the truth I have had no troubles on any microsoft operating systems. I ran windows 95a on a 486 dx2 33 with 20 megs of ram (edo ram btw so they were nasty slow buggers). It ran perfect, no problems at all (cept slow).

I've ran windows 98 and 98 second edition on 686, amds k6/2 400, and even on p3's, stable as anything.

Basically with any operating system its all gotta do with house-keeping and ensure you install stable drivers, once that is done no problem.

I now run xp's and linux boxes' in my home network, they happily live and co-exist next to one another without any trouble.

I agree with you that normal maintenance and housekeeping will maintain a stable operating system for a long time. Windows 98 never gave me any issues - Windows 95 was the only one that ever gave me any problems. Win2k, Win98, and WinXP haven't given me a peep of issues in my home network. In fact, I'm still running the same Win98 client on my Pentium One that I installed about six or seven years ago. My old 486 ran Win95 - I was smokin' with a dx4 and 32mb of FPM SIMM RAM. :p Of course, that CPU only lasted a few weeks before burning up. Then it was back to my dx2. :(