Third time's a charm

Third time's a charm...

I'm in the midst of installing Windows 98 on a Gateway Solo 2300 laptop. It can be somewhat challenging installing Windows onto a blank hard drive on a laptop when you can only use either the CD-ROM drive or the Floppy drive, not both at once. I think I've finally got it down to a science:

1. Boot from Windows 98 Startup Disk.

2. Run fdisk and partition the hard disk. Reboot to Windows 98 Startup disk.

3. format c:

4. sys c:

5. copy the contents of a: to c:\

6. edit autoexec.bat and change the a:\ in the path to c:\

7. edit setramd.bat and change the reference "a:\findramd" to "c:\findramd"

8. Put the CD-ROM drive in, with the Windows 98 CD in it and reboot. If all goes well, you'll boot from the hard disk, and it'll detect the CD-ROM.

9. Make a directory called Win98 (or whatever you want) and copy the contents of the Win98 directory on the CD-ROM to it.

10. Go to C:\win98 and run setup.exe, this will install Windows 98 from this directory, meaning you'll never be prompted to insert the CD when you're on the road and you need some silly driver you've never used before.

I finally got the fax I was waiting for from FileMaker. This was the third time we'd called them about this, and the third time they said they were faxing it. This time, I refused to get off the phone until the technician I was speaking to personally faxed the information to me. He was nice about it, I think he understood my frustration at having to call three times to receive a simple fax.