How Can I Format & Reinstall WITHOUT Floppy Drive?

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I was given an old Dell Pentium II laptop with Win 2000. The OS has become troublesome. I do not have Win 2000 disk. Want to repartition / format hard drive, then install Win ME. But laptop has no floppy drive to boot from — and I don’t have Win 2000 emergency boot disk anyway. Anyone know of a workaround?

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You could temporarily install your hard drive on another system, reformat, make it bootable and copy the installation files to a folder (Install or similar).

StuartR

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STUART: Thanks for trying to help. Though your solution does make sense technically, it’s too much hassle tearing out the hard drive, trying to fit it to another computer, then moving it back in to the laptop. If there’s not a much simpler way, I’d rather just dump the thing.
One thought: perhaps I could get a floppy drive from Dell for that laptop — or else a cheap external floppy drive? — then try to find someone who has a Win 2000 floppy boot disk in order to do the partitioning and hard drive format.
Then use my Win ME floppy boot disk to do the ME install. Does that make any sense or am I oversimplifying a more complicated issue?

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I think the external floppy drive is a reasonable path to take. Googling around, I see $25-$35 USB drives a-plenty. Don’t know if your P II has USB, but if not there are probably still parallel port external floppy drives around. I still have one from my old Gateway P II laptop. It also seems that you should be able to use YOUR WinME floppies to boot the machine and re-format the drive, without going through the W2K process, but I haven’t ever tried it.

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AL: A belated big thank-you for your thoughts and encouragement.
Does anyone else out there have experience with using a WinME floppy to boot a Win 2000 machine and re-format the drive, then install Win ME (it’s an old Pentium II laptop).

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From my own experience and from what I read due to my experience, you can “boot” with a ME floppy disk but you cannot format the drive with it and then reinstall W2k…. it doesn’t work. You need a Win 95 or 98 boot floppy. But you wrote that you aren’t intending to reinstall W2k but ME, so that might work??? Understand, most people would consider that a digression and an unwise one at that since ME, with few exceptions, is inferior and problematic vs. W2k.

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A) I agree Win 2K is superior to Win Me. But original install some years ago was not done well. Administrative permissions and other areas of the OS config are awkward and troublesome and prevent install/integration of other programs. So I’d rather just dump it and substitute a simpler, less complicated OS to create an easy-to-use travel notebook that won’t require W2K complications.
If I can get hold of a 2K disk maybe I could reinstall over the current install and make the system more obedient. Would that work??

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If I can get hold of a 2K disk maybe I could reinstall over the current install and make the system more obedient. Would that work??

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Have you tried running the “chkdsk [volume:] /f” command, e.g., chkdsk C: /f? I would do that first as it is sometimes quite effective in fixing system problems.

If you can hold of another W2k installation CD you could first try the less aggressive approach:

1) run the “sfc /scannow” command with the disc in your CD ROM.
2) yes you can do a “repair” (over the top) install with another W2k CD but I am not sure if you will be prompted for the S/N or if it isn’t necessary with a repair install.

Jeff

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If the 2K machine is using NTFS then I do not think it can be formatted using any of the FAT 32 boot disks.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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