britain4 wrote:

I have a few machines that have neither a floppy nor a CD drive so these would require a bootable copy of DOS loading onto the drive from another machine, along with the 9x setup files then transfer the HDD over to the system in question and run the setup from there.

Well, a machine with neither floppy nor CD drive seems pretty useless to me. How are you going to get software on it later anyway? If it got at least USB, you could try booting FreeDOS from a thumb drive, change over to the hard disk, and run setup.

To make a hard disk bootable, you need to either format it using the "/s" parameter, or do a "sys x: c:" with x: being the disk you bootet DOS from.

When I say no CD drive I mean not a bootable one. However I mainly transfer files and software over to these systems using a PCMCIA - Compact flash adapter, has worked fine for me for many years now.

No USB either I'm afraid and there lies the issue. The machines are of the Windows 95-98 era and have either lost their external drives or the internal ones no longer work, or there is no option to boot from CD.

Can I load FreeDOS on a modern PC that can boot from a thumb drive and then install it on the IDE drive connected to the computer by USB?

Or can I do what you describe about formatting the drive as bootable using a USB adapter?

One other thing that occurred to me is that there is a piece of software called Rufus that can make a bootable FreeDOS thumb drive. Could I plug the IDE hard drive I want to install Windows on into a USB adapter, run Rufus on it and make a bootable FreeDOS drive that way, copy the Windows install files over to the drive and then plug it into the system in question and install from there?

Or would the easiest way just be to insert the hard drive into a system that does have a floppy drive, install MS-DOS from there, copy the Windows files over then install Windows with the hard drive in the machine I want to use?

Of course you can connect the hard disk to any other computer that can boot DOS (from whatever media), do a "format c: /s" so the hard disk is made bootable, copy the setup files, put the hard disk back into the machine it was taken from, and boot and run setup from there. You don't need to install a full DOS - the system files are enough. This happens with "format c: /s" or if you do "sys a: c:" after formatting.

If you set up the drive from another computer, you will also need to run fdisk to set the partition ACTIVE.

Or you can use diskpart to do the same thing, just without a guided interface... if you are using Windows XP or newer to set up the drive.

And instead of doing a full format to make it bootable, you can issue the
SYS
command in order to make the drive bootable and copy the files needed for booting to the root of the drive. You will need to do that after booting from DOS or from the command prompt within Windows 3.1/95/98/NT.
https://www.computerhope.com/syshlp.htm

OK thanks for that. Very clear. One final question, do you know if I can run that format command from the W98 boot disk? I have it on both floppy and CD so that would be extremely useful.

Both fdisk and format should be on that disk, yes.

I used a bootable Win98 CD earlier on and used the format command (also tried out the sys command) and all went without a hitch (except the CD did not come with format and neither did my boot floppy so I had to add it.)

I’m getting a USB adapter but for now that works, thanks all.

I’ve had a couple of different suggestions from people on how I might go about doing it an easier way:

Use the sys command in a VM and then copy the files over to the HDD in the USB caddy from there, plus the setup files

In a USB caddy use a partition manager to make the drive bootable then copy over the boot disk files and setup files

And my own idea of using Rufus to make the drive a bootable FreeDOS drive then copying the setup files over

Which I’ll try out and update with how they all work out.

ok. The hardest way to do this is also the most easyest way. Open up the computers that don't have cd rom or floppy. Either leave the cover off the PC and just plug a spare CD rom and floppy into the motherboards for the purpose of just formatting and copying over the files. Or just take out the hard drive from the computer and carry it to another compute that has a floppy and cd rom drive. Disconnect the Harddrive and plug your hard drive in. Format and copy over the files. Then reinstall the hard drive back into the PC and run windows setup from there. Again not complicated but hardest way to do this.

If those computers that don't have cd or floppy had a network card capable of PXE boot this is actually the easiest way but also the most technical one and time consuming if you don't have it setup to do this.

Cheers for that. I've actually found a system now which is slightly inconvenient but I'm happy enough with it. I do pretty much what you said, I transfer the hard drive over to a system that has a CD drive, boot from a Win98SE boot CD, copy the system files over, then I copy the disk contents from whichever version of Windows I want to install (and optionally 98lite), then transfer the drive back to the system with no CD or floppy then run the Windows install.

For laptops I have a Toshiba Satellite A30 I've been meaning to put a fresh XP install on and some more RAM, for desktops I've just built a very basic P3 system out of old parts so I use that (hope to start upgrading that soon!)