Subj : Re: WinXP
To   : ALAN ZISMAN
From : ROBERT FOWLER
Date : Fri Sep 09 2005 09:47 am

-=> ALAN ZISMAN wrote to JAY EMRIE <=-

 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?

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

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

 That's what I was thinking, but I fogot that his laptop has no
 CD reader to boot the Linux live CD. :-(

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

 Very good point.

 That leaves copying the Win95 folder to a compressed archive, spanned
 over multiple floppies, as perhaps the most practical approach.

 Regards,

 Robert Fowler
 

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