DOS Refresher

[smith727]

I am trying to set a hard drive to boot like a boot disk. The last time I did this was years ago, and if memory serves, I had to load command.com, autoexec.bat, config.sys and  mscdex and then I had to edit autoexec.bat and config.sys. I'm trying to load windows 2000 on an older laptop that shares a single bay between the cd rom and the floppy drive.  
I'm drawing a blank here on the way to pull this off. Any ideas?

[gussery]

I take it this laptop computer cannot be configured to boot to CD.  Is that correct?

Many of the older models that would not allow that, but came with interchangeable drives also came with a cable that you could connect between the floppy drive and the laptop, thus allowing you to have the CD in the bay and boot to the floppy.

Just thinking out loud here...........
If not you will need to use the floppy drive to format the hard drive, install dos, find the appropriate CD drivers, load them on the hard drive, edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys (the specs should be included with the dos drivers).  Problem here is Windows 2000 wants to install to FAT32 or NTFS formatted partitions.

[smith727]

That's exactly why I don't want to go through all of that. I could install DOs, then windows 3.11, (Istill have it). I could then upgrade to win 95 and I could change the file allocation table from 16 bits to 32 bits and upgrade to windows 98 and then upgrade to 2000 allowing 2000 to change my hard drive partition to NTFS; but, ... why go through all of that when there is a way to copy a boot disk to the hard drive in such a manner that it will boot? Windows 98 setup disk used to boot to a virtual a:>/ drive if memory serves.

[gussery]

Some Windows 98 boot disks used to create a
RAM drive at D:, it included system tools etc. but the command processor was still on A:

Problem is you're talking about loading the command processor into a RAM Drive, then switching out the drive bay and reprocessing the autoexec.bat and config.sys from the RAM Drive.

I have never had ocassion to do that but it sounds like an interesting exercise.

[smith727]

I did it once years ago, messing with another old laptop.

[Computer_Commando]

I've done this on several computers:  one has only a hard drive (no floppy and no CD), another has a floppy and no CD.  Here is a suggestion:
Remove HD from notebook and install in desktop.  Perform your Win2k installation on the desktop and move drive back to notebook computer.  If you are lucky, it will boot.  If not, just make it a DOS bootable hard drive with CD support.  Of course, you will need a 2.5 to 3.5 disk drive adapter kit like this:

[smith727]

I already tried that, and I was not lucky.

Do you know how to adjust the autoexec.bat and config.sys files so that it will boot from the hard drive??