Trying to resurrect an ancient laptop...

geek 0001

geek 0001

Member
I have an old Zenith Z note GT with no operating system and I'm trying to load an os onto it. The problem is that the computer is so old that the bios only allows booting from a floppy or the hard drive. The floppy drive is dead so the only way to boot would be from the hard drive. Is there any way to make the hard drive bootable?
 
OK, if you have extra time to waste, here is what I would do, Take out the HDD, Get an 2.5 IDE to USB adapter(Assuming its the 2.5 IDE Standard), Hook the laptop HDD up to a working computer using the adapter, Install MS-DOS onto the laptop HDD using the working computer, then Make a new folder Called "Installation Files" or something like that, then Get your choice of operating system (Again assuming Its windows, never tried it with linux), Copy the entire content of the Operating System CD into the "Installation Files" folder. OK, now put the laptop HDD back into the laptop, and boot it up, If you have correctly installed MS DOS, Then it should boot into the C:/ Prompt, then type

"cd installation files"

Without the quotes, and navigate to the setup file of the operating system, using the "cd", or change directory command, following that would be that the folder name so "cd "folder name"" and once you reach the destination folder with the setup file, then type "setup", or "install" depending on your operating system and it should start installing the operating system.

I did just a little bit of research, and I assume you have a 5GB hdd? If its anything smaller, It might not be possible to use this method, since some of the HDD space will be used by the installation files.
And I have used this method on Older Dell machines, and Its worked before.

Well I wish you luck, and if you have any problems, just ask, and someone should be able to help you.
-Jon
 
This might work for Windows versions of Win98 or earlier since they are DOS based, certainly won't work for later versions because they won't let you install an OS on to the drive you booted from.

I think you'll find the max partition size you can create in DOS is 2G. You could partition 2 2G partitions, make the first partition DOS bootable then put the install files on the second partition. Once you boot then you would be able to run setup from the 2nd partition.

Does the laptop have a parallel port? If so, you might be able to find a parallel port attach 3.5" floppy drive or CD ROM drive on Ebay or somewhere like that (search for microsolutions backpack). Unfortunately, you still won't be able to boot from one of these devices but once you got the laptop to boot to DOS you could use them for installing other software.
 
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