so I need to install DOS, windows 3.1, Print Shop Deluxe III, and a printer driver onto this Pentium II laptop.

Difficulty: The system has a dead CD-ROM drive. It does have a floppy drive, however... but that's a lot to move via floppy.

It's a win98-era laptop. It has USB, serial, parallel, PS/2, dual PCMCIA slots, floppy, DVD (broken), and a docking connector.

So now my challenge is: How do I get this software onto the machine without having to slowly write something like 10 floppy disks?

I don't know if there's any software I could install that'd let me use the USB ports.

well, any software short of Win98. I'd love to have win98 on here, but HOW DO IT GET IT OVER THERE?

@foone usb flash drive?

so probably I copy over something that'll let me null-modem the serial to my main laptop

if I had access to my PCMCIA cards I could plug in an ethernet card and network stuff over.

but I don't

@foone I wonder if 10 diskettes are really slower than a USB 1 CDROM

@foone Maybe file transfer over the serial port? Probably slow, but at least you don't have to manually write 10 floppies that way...

(I haven't tried it yet, but I do want to try it with a computer that I have that doesn't have Ethernet, at some point.)

@moftasa it can't boot off USB, so I'd need to move something via floppy that can talk USB

@pjakobs it has a REALLY SLOW floppy drive

@foone can't you just take out the hdd and dd an image?

@foone Shot in the dark, but would Plop Boot Manager work? I think it might be possible to chainload USB with it.

@kewliomzx I don't think so, because the BIOS doesn't know how to talk to a USB storage device at all. and I think plop would just be able to chainload to any device the BIOS can talk to

@tecteun don't have the correct adapters handy, it's using a 44pin IDE hard drive

@foone there is a USB stack for DOS. Also, KolibriOS has a USB stack that should be supported. Either are going to be just one floppy

@foone there’s probably a ”linux on a couple of diskettes” thing you can use

@foone the old DOS versions of Laplink or clones thereof were good for that purpose.

@foone but as slow as 12MBit/s?
hmm... 12Mbit/s is a raw 1.5MByte/s - that's at least more raw bandwith. A 1x CDROM does 300kByte/s so you would be able to run a 4x probably, yes, that should be faster than any floppy.
The things we used to put up with back then!

@foone freedos might do that, no?

did my USB floppy drive just die on me?!

I'll have to switch to one of my many other USB floppy drives.

@foone back in the day we used norton commander in m/s mode to copy stuff via null modem. Not really fast but overnight you could whoop some megs.

@foone usb device on computer A that emulates a ps/2 keyboard for computer B, stream keystrokes to it to type all the files into a hex editor

@emily I have honestly considered it

SO FUN FACT: if you let this machine spin down the hard drive (which it'll do as soon as there's 5 minutes of no activity), it can't spin it back up!

so if you get delayed providing the requested Disk 2 of DOS 6.22 because your USB drive died, and it has to wait for over 5 minutes... the drive will spin down and not come back up.

so the installer will read the files off the drive and then completely fail to write them to the disk! and you have to start over again!

I fixed this setting in the BIOS but the CMOS battery is dead which means if you leave it powered off for more than like 30 seconds, it resets all the values and turns it back on for you

COMPUTERS ARE FUN
28 year old laptops even moreso

@foone only ten disks? Tell me you've never installed Microsoft Office from floppies without telling me, etc :-)

@foone i read this post before the rest of the thread and was worried about your sanity for a second

@kw217 I have been looking for a copy of that office installer, I'd love to do it, maybe on video?

I'm just annoyed with doing lots of disks because this laptop has a very slow floppy drive

@foone Kinda sounds like a 2 cups of coffee job

@foone have I got the product for you!

@foone I wonder if you could replace the CMOS with a pin-compatible flash memory chip. Unless it's one of those all-in-one things that have a built-in RTC.

@foone Cursed idea: one of those adapters for the cassette player in '80s/'90s cars with them, except for a floppy drive.

I finally finished installing DOS 6.22 onto it

and then the hard drive failed

@foone Ahh, the genuine 1980s DOS experience then?

I think I have a CF to 44pin IDE adapter somewhere

@foone my way of installing Windows 98 is Connect the hdd to another machine, copy a minimal dos and the windows installation disk and every driver/utility for having usb and lan working and then reconnect the hdd to the original machine and install all the software

@foone Failed how? If it's not spinning the platters, it could be that the lubrication has degraded over time, but if you can manually rotate the spindle a few times you might be able to breathe new life into it. Though probably not a lot of life, and you'd want to keep it spinning for a while to let the bad lube work its way out.

Bad lube.

@foone oh noes

@foone It's cursed.

@Tamber that's the only kind of computer I work with, yeah

alice! hey alice.
future alice listen to me: when you do set up the CF to 44pin thing, partition and format it using the DOS disk in the laptop, then remove it again connect it to your laptop and just copy over windows 98 or whatever. don't deal with serial or floppies

@foone

Argh! I remember that happening with a Mac Duo and external Seagate (SCSI), back in the day.

(I have never bought Seagate drives since then.) 🤬 3:O(>

@miifox that'd work, if I could get my hands on my PCMCIA cards, but I don't have an easy way to write to it on the other end. my thinkpad doesn't exactly have a PCMCIA/cardbus slot anymore

@foone @miifox there are pcmcia to CF adapters (I know since I use one for my Amiga 600), just need a CF to USB for the other end (which should be an option on most multicard readers)

@foone PCMCIA CF adapter!

@foone what about transferring things over the serial port, using a null modem cable? You'll need another system with a serial port, but you could presumably even transfer an entire disk image to the destination machine, write it to a new partition, and then tweak the partition table to boot off of the new partition.