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Installing DOS / Windows on external drive for older PC

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First post, by fierarul

Posted on 
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Newbie

Hello,

I finally got around to restoring my old Cyrix PC (which was in an attic in my hometown).

After waiting for the PS2/AT adapters and such I now tried to boot it and noticed the floppy drive is not reading anything.

So... perhaps the drive itself is broken. The floppy disks are also pretty old themselves so I'm not convinced they are entirely good either.

Now, I do have another PC here with some old XP on it and PuppyLinux on another disk.

Instead of running the DOS / Windows installer from floppies, couldn't I just write an already-installed disk image to an IDE drive and then swap the drive to my Cyrix PC?

Could you point me towards such DOS / Windows 3.1 / 9x disk images?

Now that I think about it I also have a CD drive here, so a CD (live) image would also be an idea to try out.

Reply 3 of 4, by gdjacobs

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l33t++

You can use the HDD as a passthrough with Qemu/KVM/whatever masquerading the drive as a PIIX4 IDE instead of USB or eSATA connected device. No need to DD from the raw image to the drive. I do this all the time when I want to work with floppy disk images and don't want the hassle of real FDD media.

All hail the Great Capacitor Brand Finder

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