On 2 Dec 2005 at 14:37, Hugh Vandervoort wrote:

> I'm not exactly sure why you're trying this,

I should have re-pasted my original post, but briefly to revive a nice
little laptop that no longer appears able to support an internal HD.  I
already have a USB external that I can download photos from my camera to,
and running the laptop with this moored in the USB port is not so
cumbersome an alternative, and preferable for me than throwing the laptop
away.  It's a P266 and 'uneconomical to repair' I'm informed.


> but Bart PE may put you on the
> right track: "It will give you a complete Win32 environment with network
> support, a graphical user interface (800x600) and FAT/NTFS/CDFS filesystem
> support. Very handy for burn-in testing systems with no OS, rescuing files
> to a network share, virus scan and so on. This will replace any Dos
> bootdisk in no time"! http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ There are complete Linux
> OSs on a CD also. http://rz-obrian.rz.uni-karlsruhe.de/knoppix-usb/ This
> Fred Langa article may help also:
> http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=28700158&
> pgno=1

The Lana looks the most promising way forward, but seems to rely on being
able to flash the BIOS with an update to allow boot from USB.  This could
be an interesting project without HD access!

I can boot from the floppy or CD, and was hoping to be able to hand over
to the USB external from there to an installation of Windows.  I don't
really understand CD installations that boot into Windows on the CD as I
thought it was necessary for the system to do disk writes, use a swop file
etc, and obviously it can't do that on a CD as if it were an HD.  I've got
a couple of magazine LINUX DVDs like that, but they are really just demos,
not anything you can do any work on.

Thanks Hugh, it gives me something to try.

Best wishes,   Neil


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