Help

[Nod]

I finally managed to get one of my computers to work. A shitty old gateway with a hard drive that must be ten years old in it. I say it must be ten years old because the OS on it is Win98. My plan is to wipe the drive and install Damn Small Linux until I can get the lap top I have my eye on next week. The problem is that it doesn't have a flash drive or even a working CD-Rom. It has a CD-Rom in it but for some reason neither DOS nor Windows will recognize it. I've tried everything I can think of to get it to work but nothing seems to get either OS to see it. I tried using my USB external but Win98 doesn't have the appropriate driver to view what's on it and the only way to get DOS to recognize it would be to download the appropriate driver from the internet and install it. Since Win98 doesn't have the right driver to work my cable modem I can't download it directly and with no flash or CD-ROM even if I got the driver I wouldn't be able to even put it on the computer in the first place. Can someone PLEASE help me?

[mr_doc]

Can you boot from the cd-rom?
What are you posting from?

[trevelyn]

Today at 12:44:02 PM LordNod - My phone ran out of minutes. I've gotten a hard drive to load up DOS finally though

so you have DOS now? can you attach to a network to install from a networked CDROM? It should be the Last section in smb.conf in a default samba install from say.. apt-get or something.  Just boot another machine that is running linux and install samba then stick the install cdrom into the drive.  wait how the hell do you attach to a router with just DOS? i though DOS was only a toy.  Like for deleting files and shit?  does DOS do real things? If I came to this problem i would google like crazy....

[Nod]

I got my CDROM drive to work in WIN98. However it wouldn't copy the Damn Small Linux files that I had burned to a CD from my mom's computer. So now I'm going to download another couple of copies and burn them and see if I can get them to copy correctly on to the comptuer I'm trying to get running. I'm wiping windows out.

[mr_doc]

Why not download the version of DSL that lets you install from boot?
You can hook your shitty computer to another via serial cable if 'direct cable connection' is already installed.
You could throw the cdrom driver on a 3.5 disk and run it in dos (mscdex.exe) to access your cdrom from dos. Beyond that I don't see what dos can do for you.

[Nod]

I finally got a version of windows fixed. My plan now is to turn one of the five boxes I have sitting around into a linux box of some short. That way when the windows box goes down again, as it's invariably destined to do, I'll at least have something to surf the net and play on.