First post, by JimUK
Hello,
I recently acquired an old T4900CT laptop from my dad (he was using it as a decoy laptop in case of burglars) And I plugged it in and it worked straight away!
However I don't own any floppy disks or have any floppy disk drives on any of my windows 10 pcs, so I was struggling to find a way of transferring files to and from the laptop. I do however have a USB to IDE / PATA cable, so I disconnected the HDD from the laptop, hooked it up to my PC and hoped for the best. I could hear the drive spinning up, where it would show a few files in explorer, then spin down again and kept repeating this. So I unplugged and tried a different (powered USB HUB) port. However unplugging the drive seemed to break it, as I could no longer see the drive in windows, or in the T4900CT laptop 🙁
It seems the reason it was spinning up and down was insufficient power to the drive via the PATA connection, so I borrowed a powered cable from work and have managed to recover mid to late 90s photos and files from the drive.
To replace the drive i've bought an mSATA to PATA adapter to use a 32GB mSATA as the new hard drive, however I'm now struggling to find a way of getting an operating system back onto the machine without a floppy drive.
I thought it would be easy to create a bootable drive with the msdos 6.22 and windows 95 setup files ready to install, but I seem to be really struggling. Will I have to give up and resort to buying a 3 1/2" floppy drive and disks just to be able to create a boot disk?
It also seems now that after trying to use an msdos boot disk image to create a bootable partition that my PC only recognises the first 4gb of space and windows disk management or MiniTool Partition Wizard doesn't recognise the unallocated space!
Any ideas would be appreciated because I seem to be digging myself into a hole.
Thanks
Jim