Subj : Re: WinXP
To   : JAY EMRIE
From : Alan Zisman
Date : Fri Sep 09 2005 01:22 am

-=> JAY EMRIE wrote to ROBERT FOWLER <=-

 RF> I had a brainstorm this afternoon thinking about Jay's predicament
 RF> with the Win95 USB laptop, and thought hey, maybe a Linux CD would
 RF> allow him to use his USB flash drive.

 JE> I'm a mite puzzled here. Admittedly I do not know Linux very well,
 JE> but how would a Linux CD help me with a system that does NOT have a CD
 JE> reader?

 JE> Jay

 RF> I have a USB multi-card reader here, so I tested it with all of the
 RF> live CD distros I had.  Linspire saw it but would not read it.  The
 RF> others, including Knoppix, MEPIS and Ubuntu, didn't find it.  Xandros
 RF> saw and read it.  That's indicative of the challenge for Linux, IMO.

Robert is suggesting that if you first copy the \WIN95 folder from an install 
CD onto the flash drive using a system that had both a CD drive and usable USB 
ports. Next, boot the laptop to a live Linux CD (like Knoppix for instance) 
you'll find that it will let you read and write to your laptop's FAT16 hard 
drive AND provide USB support, so you can access the USB flash drive.

As a result, you could copy the contents of the flash drive onto the laptop's 
hard drive, then reboot to DOS and install from there.

The potential problem, I suspect, is that the older laptop probably has 16-32 
MB of RAM (I had one running W95A with 12 MB of RAM... it worked OK). If Linux 
runs at all with that little RAM, it may be very unhappy! (Yes, I know Linux 
can run in terminal mode with relatively small amounts of RAM, but Knoppix (et 
al) wants to load a full graphical interface, and really wants as much RAM as a 
comparable Windows system.

But it may be worth a try!
.... Inet mail to: alan at zisman dot ca
--- MultiMail/Win32 v0.46
 * Origin: COMM Port OS/2 juge.com 204.89.247.1 (281) 980-9671 (1:106/2000)

.