Im considering buying an older laptop for aim and web browsing that I can use as a secondary system in a spare room. It does not have an OS and only has an external floppy drive. What, if any, version of windows installs directly from a floppy? After installing an older version of windows on the laptop can I upgrade it to XP via my other PC across my network? What are my options? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks Dev.

I'm only going by what I know, but I doubt you could.

Floppies were designed for FAT16 systems. The last operating system to use them was Windows 95 a.

The easiest way with what you have is to get a cheap IDE CDRom and buy a USB enclosure, assuming your laptop hardware has the specifications.

Originally posted by Insomniac
The easiest way with what you have is to get a cheap IDE CDRom and buy a USB enclosure, assuming your laptop hardware has the specifications.

I will second that (damn that was difficult to type). Without cdrom support/deviceyou may find it more trouble than it is worth, MO.

If the laptop only has a floppy drive, I doubt it has enough capability to even run XP on it. What are the specs of the laptop?

It can just barely run XP. Its a PII 300mhz, w/ 128mb of ram. I thought about adding the external cd-rom, but how can I install it if there isnt an OS installed? Will the Laptop automatically recognize it if its connected via USB?

Originally posted by develitate
It can just barely run XP

Just barely is a huge understatement. Just because the spec is within MS' minimum requirements, doesn't mean the thing will be usable. You would be far better advised to try getting something like Windows 98 to run.

I have a VERY old IBM Thinkpad 360CSE with a super 12MHz 486 CPU which I have managed to get 95 running on. Here's how I did it -

Using a Windows 95 floppy loaded with FDISK and FORMAT, I partitioned the huge (end sarcasm) 500Mb hard disk into two drives. One drive is yay big (I think about 350Mb) and the other is 'just' big enough to fit the setup from a Windows 95 CD. I then loaded Windows 95 on the laptop from floppy to allow me to have network access through a PCMCIA network card. I copied the 95 setup CD across to the specially made hard disk partition and booted into DOS again with the floppy. I re-installed Windows from the setup partition. The reason for doing that and not leaving the OS installed from floppy was two fold. One, it allowed Windows to pull the drivers it needed faster than telling me which of 30 or so (I think) floppys it wanted, me finding it and then it reading the disk. Second, it will allow me to re-install the OS for whatever reason a lot faster than hand feeding the floppys again.

Doing something similar is the only way I can see you getting on OS installed. You will not be able to boot a CD from USB in a laptop that old. Even using a 98 or ME disk with the Boot With CD option won't work as they won't initialise the USB and I really don't think your lappy's BIOS will do that at the boot stage.

Time to go looking for the Windows 95 setup disks on Ebay me thinks.

the drivers for the cdrom would be loaded when you insert the win 98 startup disk and press load with cd rom enabled or whatever it says. then once you have formatted the drive you put the cd in and type setup, hey presto, windows starts loading

Not if the drive is USB.

you could make a network boot disk so you can boot from the floppy with network support and then install across the network it doesn't matter which OS but I think you will be lucky if a laptop that age is compatible with XP

I didnt know you could set up a network with DOS even if you have the network boot disc. It doesnt matter if its XP or 98 because im only using it for AIM and web browsing, 95 would be ok too.

take a look at this link

http://appdeploy.com/techhomes/networkbootdisk.asp

Win98SE or if you want something more recent you could try Win2000.

I had to do a laptop older that this recently (P133 64Mb). What I did was boot off a floppy & format the harddisk. Then I used Laplink via a parallel cable to copy the install files from the cd on another computer to the hdd & ran the setup from there. Took a while to copy but it only has to be done once.