install on a machine with no floppy, and CDROM won't boot

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Corey Cooper - 29 Apr 2007 04:39 GMT

I have an old POS (Point of Sale) machine that is no longer supported by the
company that made it (NEC), at least not withouth paying more than the
device is worth. It is from '99, has Win NT on it, is small, and has a
really nice touchescreen built-in. I want it just to play with, maybe a
music player front end for my house or something. I want to install Windows
2000 on it. It has no floppy disk port, and I can get a CDROM drive plugged
in (by leaving it in pieces) but it has no BIOS support for booting to the
CDROM. All my Windows 2000 install disks have to boot to work. I tried to
install windows 2000 to the hard disk and then go through the 'switching to
a new motherboard' procedure, but it also requires booting on the CDROM.

Perhaps I could make a spare hard disk think it's a win 2K install CDROM,
but how? Anyone have any ideas on that or anyother method?

C.

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John John - 29 Apr 2007 13:51 GMT

As long as you can boot the machine in some form or other you can copy
the i386 folder from the cd-rom to the hard disk and then launch
winnt.exe or winnt32.exe from the folder to do the installation. You
use winnt.exe if you do it from DOS and winnt32.exe if you want to
upgrade an existing Windows installation. Use the /b switch to specify
a floppyless installation. Example:

[drive]:\I386\WINNT.EXE /B

[drive]:\I386\WINNT32.EXE /B

John

> I have an old POS (Point of Sale) machine that is no longer supported by the
> company that made it (NEC), at least not withouth paying more than the
[quoted text clipped - 11 lines]
>
> C.

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John John - 29 Apr 2007 14:00 GMT

PS. Are you sure that the machine will run Windows 2000 and are you
sure that the necessary drivers for Windows 2000 even exist for the
machine? It mght just be easier to get NT4 to run your mucic player.

John

> As long as you can boot the machine in some form or other you can copy
> the i386 folder from the cd-rom to the hard disk and then launch
[quoted text clipped - 25 lines]
>>
>> C.

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Robert Roland - 29 Apr 2007 14:01 GMT

>I want to install Windows
>2000 on it. It has no floppy disk port, and I can get a CDROM drive plugged
>in (by leaving it in pieces) but it has no BIOS support for booting to the
>CDROM.

Does it have a USB port? Maybe it can boot DOS from a USB floppy?

>All my Windows 2000 install disks have to boot to work.

You can also install Windows 2000 from MS-DOS, by executing
i386\winnt.exe.

If there is no other way to boot than the hard disk, you can
temporarily move the disk to another machine, and install MS-DOS. From
there, you can either copy the Windows CD to the hard disk, or you
could install MS-DOS drivers to access the CD-ROM from MS-DOS.

Make sure you install Smartdrive, the disk cache driver for MS-DOS. It
speeds up the installation dramatically.

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RoRo

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