Floppy Disk Drives and DOS Installation for 701c/701cs

[BovineMage]

Well, I'm glad to be back here after so long, and after removing that culprit RAM stick, my 701c's back on its feet (thankfully). Now, I'm encountering a new problem:

I decided to install DOS and Windows 3.11 for workgroups on my 701c, for now, because I want a DOS-Box to just lug around for kicks. However, I don't have a functional floppy disk drive by which to install anything on my laptop (the only one that I have is a PCMCIA IBM Portable Drive Bay FRU 37L1513) and I suspect that the 701c will only recognize a floppy drive connected to the DB25 parallel port on the port duplicator addon.

I do, however, have a IDE to USB HDD enclosure by Rosewill that I am using to mess around with the 720 MB that came with the laptop, so I have already tried to use several solutions, like putting boot up system files (Command.com, MSDOS.sys, IO.sys) onto the active partition with no success.

Any suggestions on either where I can get a workable floppy drive that the laptop will recognize directly from bootup and/or suggestions that I can use to install MS-DOS 6.22 without floppy disk (just via HDD enclosure) will be greatly appreciated.

Looking for sagely advice,

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

I don't know of a reliable way to do this without a floppy drive -- there are too many things to go wrong. I'd suggest posting a WTB in the Marketplace forum here, and searching on eBay for a floppy drive.

--Paul

[BovineMage]

Well, I looked up the FRU number (10H4056) on ebay and lo and behold, I was able to find a FDD with cable for 10 dollars and free shipping. Not bad at all.

Hopefully this would work, but I also want to see if I can attempt this without a FDD too, so those people out there without a FDD would at least not be without options. I'll post any of my solutions on here, and I'll appreciate input from other people too.

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

That's great. Any problem you can solve for 10 bucks is not a big problem

When your floppy drive arrives, boot from a DOS disk and type:

FORMAT C: /S

That will set up the boot tracks properly (and also wipe the drive clean -- make sure you want to do that).

--Paul

[craigmontHunter]

I am pretty sure That can work from the t60, I am working off of what I remember from the t40 (gpu issue, supperior reball is fixing it), if you have a windows 98 boot cd. All you do is connect the old hard drive to the T60 before you turn it on and make sure that the bios is set to automatically configure USB devices, and then tell the computer to boot off the CD with CD rom support. If that works, assuming that the primary hard drive is not in compatiblity mode, the CD rom drive should load as D: and the external hard drive should load as C:. You may want to check that using FDisk (in the \win98 folder on the cd) and option 4 is "view partition information". That should match the old hard drive. After that you just exit Fdisk (press esc) and if there is no information you want on the drive, type "Format c: /s /q" (the /q is quick format, takes a lot less time). To test, you may just want to restart the computer and try booting off the "removable disk" option on the boot menu (press F12 at the bios screen), and it should load windows 98 dos.

All this is from memory and includes a few assumtions, so try it at your own risk

Jack

[Paul Pennington]

You can go ahead and try Jack's method if you want -- it won't hurt anything. Usually, though, especially on these old units, there is some kind of a head/cylinder/sector mismatch between the two computers, and the drive will only work in the computer it was set up in.

--Paul

[BovineMage]

Got the floppy drive, and it's the correct one... the only problem now is getting the correct cable! The FRU number for the cable is 04H6916, and the one that I got was made for the 600 line (12J1711), so I can't do anything right now; if anybody has any leads on a cheap cable (10-15 dollars), I would be forever grateful.

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

Too bad, the cables are harder to find than the floppy drive (as you now know). Put a WTB in the Marketplace here in case somebody who does not monitor this forum has one. You can also "save" a search on eBay for the FRU and they will email you when one comes up for sale.

--Paul

[BovineMage]

Update:

I'm having quite a bit of trouble trying to get DOS on this system.

First, I tried to just stick files from a DOS 6.22 boot up disk on the HDD; Results = "Non-system disk not recognized. Please insert system disk and press any key to continue."

Then, using the HDD enclosure, tried to partition two drives on HDD using SwissKnife and setup a main drive with bootup files from Windows 98 at first, then tried DOS 6.22 again and small "DOS622" drive with setup files; Results = Both tries ended up with computer failing to recognize files and asking for system disk again.

After this, I then used the USB HDD enclosure and CD-ROM drive with DOS 6.22 bootup CD (From AllBootDisks), at which point, I was able to use FDISK on DOS bootup disc to parition HDD into one drive again with FAT16, to try to install DOS on directly.

Finally, what I tried is using the USB HDD enclosure and Floppy USB drive at the same time to boot up from T60 BIOS screen by changing order to "USB Floppy" in the First Boot Drive setting, then using MS-DOS setup disks to install onto drive. Results = T60 did boot up with disks, and I was able to get into setup screen; However, there was no way in the DOS setup screen to choose which HDD to install too (Did not want to install to main HDD in computer, with Windows XP), and also setup inspects computer hardware when starting up, so maybe the installation is unique for that computer...?

In the end, I think it might be safest just to try to get a floppy drive for the computer that you're installing it on, and use that; but I never finished my DOS setup, so your experiences might be different. Would love to hear from people if they actually finished the setup and how it turned out for them.

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

Actually, there is a DOS command to write the system files to any disk: SYS (for write SYStem files).

Two problems: if you boot DOS on your exernal drive, it won't see the USB external hard drive.

And, I don't think that would help you anyway -- the hard disk was partitioned and formatted in the T60, and when you put it in the 701C I don't think it will be recognized at all. Go ahead and try, there's a small chance it might work.

Keep lookin' for that floppy cable, everything comes up on eBay eventually.

--Paul

[BovineMage]

Update:

I was able to obtain a FDD cable for the 701 line (FRU: 04H6916) from Blue Star Computer Corp. for $15.00 (plus $10.00 shipping). Click here to see the specific page concerning the cable (note: it lists the price as $25.00, but call them to get the real price of $15.00) They only have about 5 left, so if you need this cable at all, I would recommend getting it before they run out.

Once I get the cable, I should be able to get things rolling, and then I'll let everybody know how the procedure went.

- Bovine Mage

[BovineMage]

Update:

Well, I got my cable from Blue Stars Computer Corp. and it works perfectly. After a few days, I got MS-DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11 on it, plus, using a few websites, made it Internet-worthy! (Sort of.) My final verdict? It's freaking easier to just use the floppy disk drive, obviously, and it's unfortunate that I didn't find another way of doing it. Sorry. If anybody did find something, let me know, I may have to use it in the future. Right now, I'm just looking for good DOS games that I haven't played in a million computer-years.

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

Congratulations on bringing your Butterfly back to life at last. A floppy drive is a necessity on these old systems. You can even do a BIOS upgrade now, if you have a good battery.

What brand of 16-bit network card are you using? I need to put one in my 701C.

--Paul

[BovineMage]

Congratulations on bringing your Butterfly back to life at last. A floppy drive is a necessity on these old systems. You can even do a BIOS upgrade now, if you have a good battery.

What brand of 16-bit network card are you using? I need to put one in my 701C.

--Paul

The brand that I'm using is the Belkin 16-Bit PCMCIA Notebook Network Card (Model F5D5020); however, somebody has sucessfully used the 3Com LAN card (3CXE589DT) on their 701c. Mainly, I think as long as it's a DOS/Windows 3.1 supported 16-Bit PCMCIA card with the correct drivers (has to have special NDIS DOS drivers), then you're good. If you need, I can post some of the websites that helped me get my network up and running.

- Bovine Mage

[Paul Pennington]

Thanks for that info. I'm going to try to get a wireless card going in it, but if I settle for ethernet I'll get back to you.