Frederick said:
My disk drive is a LG GP08LU30 with no power supply capability of its
own. The instructions say if insufficient power is obtained from PC
USB power, then connect to the USB power cable which I guess is the
second male A cable-end that came with the LG. It shows that as a
separate connection on the graphic laptop pic. I only have one USB
port on this laptop. I do have a USB dongle that allows me to gang
several USB devices to one computer port. Using this, I connected
one of the LG cable male A ends to a desktop USB. That gives me
enough power to open and load a CD into the LG, but the laptop's W98
still does not recognize its presence.
The StarTech USB2HABMY3 appears same as the Cables To Go 6FT MINI-B
MALE TO (2) USB A MALE Y-CABLE Sears Item# SPM498981401 | Model# 28107
available at
http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_...001a&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=SPM498981401#desc
Do you think it is? Quite cheap. Could it do any better than what I
have now?
I don't see any such round hole on the my LG. So I guess this is out.
Thanks
Big Fred
Compaq Presario 1260 specs.
http://reviews.cnet.com/laptops/compaq-presario-1260-12/1707-3121_7-30578890.html
Looking at the vintage of the unit, I'm not sure what you can do
with it, if you cannot get the internal optical drive to work.
The 1260 has a K6 family processor, running at 333MHz. That would
make the year of introduction, perhaps around 1999 or 2000 or so.
I'm just guessing at that, since I owned a Celeron 300MHz in the
same timeframe. I can't be positive that the date at the top of the
CNET webpage, is accurate. Older machines have poor USB support.
RAM is 32MB soldered to motherboard, plus 128MB as a separate SODIMM max.
You would need to go all the way to max, to make WinXP happy. Running
WinXP on 64MB total, would likely be painful, or close to impossible.
The shipped Win98 with the thing, might do a little better in that
regard, and be a better fit for the amount of RAM likely to be inside
the machine. If you use a Linux distro as another option, many of the
modern distributions would be bloated, and getting a decent graphics
desktop to run in 160MB max, might still be a challenge. So of the 500
different Linux CDs, not all of them would be a good choice for
installation - you'd have to pick and choose.
(The BIOS screen may report the amount of RAM present, and if not,
you can download a memtest86+ test floppy, and boot the Compaq with
that, and it will display total RAM detected, on the screen.
http://www.memtest.org . The download is half way down the web page.)
And back then, it would not be likely to be able to boot from a USB
device. So if you used an external CD or DVD drive, I don't know if the
BIOS has the boot code to use one of those. Similarly, it would be
possible to use a USB key to install WinXP, but again the issue would
be, a machine that old, would not have boot code to use a USB key.
The USB port is probably USB 1.1, limiting transfer performance to
around 1MB/sec tops.
I have a vintage 1999 motherboard, and as far as I know, it only
offers to boot from an internal hard drive on the IDE cable or
an internal optical drive on the IDE cable. Mine also happens
to have a SCSI port internally, and a drive there would also boot,
and the code to do that is partially provided by the SCSI chip and
its associated BIOS code module. But back then, USB wasn't very mature,
and was mainly a peripheral port for usage once the computer was
running.
So you'd probably want to get the internal optical drive working,
as that stands the best chance of making your project work right away.
*******
If you know for certain, it boots from a USB device, then I think
I see a parallel port on the back of the machine. It could have
a 5V pin on the parallel port. Or, perhaps the machine has a
docking port, and there is power on the dock, and the dock offers
an option to connect an optical drive. But finding something for
the dock, is likely just as difficult as finding something
to replace the internal optical drive (if it happened to be broken).
*******
You have yet another option. The Presario 1260 has a floppy drive.
There is a way to install WinXP, that can use MSDOS.
You take the hard drive out of the laptop, and prepare two partitions.
Your drive is 4GB in size, so you have to be careful about the partitioning.
You'd make the first partition 3.3GB, and the second partition 700MB,
and both partitions would be FAT32 type. To prepare the laptop drive,
you'd connect it to a desktop computer IDE cable, using a 40 to 44 pin
adapter. You'd connect the drive, to the end connector. I don't know
how you'd select Master or Slave for that drive. If the drive is by
itself, Master might be the best choice.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245
Your desktop machine would have its own OS, so when the laptop drive
is connected to it, you have Disk Management to format the drive.
You define the two partitions, 3.3GB for the first FAT32 partition
(will become C
and 700MB for the second FAT32 partition (will become D
.
Next, you prepare an MSDOS floppy. If you had a Win98 machine, there is
some option using the "sys" command, which causes a minimal set of
MSDOS files to be put on the floppy.
Next, you pop the floppy into the laptop, boot, and prove the laptop
can boot from the floppy.
The floppy can benefit from adding SMARTDRV.exe to it. You can learn
more about MSDOS here. (Or perhaps with FreeDOS, it isn't needed ?)
http://www.vfrazee.com/ms-dos/6.22/help/
Now, back on the desktop machine, with the laptop hard drive connected,
you copy the i386 folder from the WinXP CD, onto the D: partition of
your newly set up laptop hard drive (you don't need the other CD content).
The WinXP CD is probably a bit less than 700MB, and the i386 folder should
just fit into D:. You might also want to bring over, any drivers for later,
if you happen to think of them. For example, if you happen to know the
Ethernet chip part number in the laptop, you might bring an NDIS driver
for that, so you can get file sharing working later (to connect to your
other computers). If file sharing is working, that's how you'd get any
additional drivers that might be needed.
OK, now you re-install the laptop hard drive. You have in hand the empty
C: (first partition) at 3.3GB, and the 700MB D: partition containing i386
and any driver folders you might like. You boot the laptop from the
MSDOS floppy. When the DOS prompt comes up, you do
d:
cd \
cd o386
winnt.exe
and what should happen, is the WinXP installer inside the d:\i386 folder,
should start to run. There are two executables in there, a winnt32.exe
(which would run from Win98 or Win2K, if you were doing a software upgrade),
or the winnt.exe file which runs from DOS. By making a DOS floppy, you
provide an OS to "bootstrap" the install process.
The winnt.exe installer, will then copy the files from D:\i386, into
the new empty 3.3GB C: partition. On the next reboot, you allow the
laptop to boot from the hard drive, and as C: will have the boot flag,
the second stage of the WinXP install will run without the floppy
being present. The WinXP installer will ask for the license key and
so on.
That's how I installed my current WinXP machine (but my drive was bigger than 4GB!),
so I know this works. I did not use the CD directly. I prepared the
two partitions as stated above, and did the install that way (purely for fun).
Note that Microsoft makes a six floppy boot set, for WinXP SP1 and SP2,
but when I tried that, I think it insisted on looking for the CD drive.
I don't remember it offering a command prompt, but perhaps it did.
The floppy set might not help you much, except if you couldn't find
a copy of MSDOS to use. Since there is FreeDOS as a substitute,
there is always a way to try it with other than Microsoft code.
Many big name manufactures use FreeDOS, such as the Seagate Seatools
for DOS, the HP Formatter sometimes bundles FreeDOS boot files, and
so on. FreeDOS is available as a part of other tools that need a
basic boot environment.
(More research required...)
http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
If you want to play with the Microsoft six-floppy set, they're only
available for usage with WinXP Gold, SP1 and SP2 CDs. I don't see a version
for SP3, and the SP2 floppies didn't "find" my SP3 CD. There was a claim the
version should match. Since I couldn't get this to work, I wouldn't
know what the success formula is. This was largely a waste of my time,
and I don't really want to recommend this as your first option. If
I'd got this to work, it might have been different. There was no
problem booting the six floppies, but the results weren't any good
to me.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310994
Paul
