Installing Windows 95: Installing without a floppy drive or port replicator
PC110

Installing Windows 95:
Installing without using a floppy drive or port replicator

 

Introduction

Many PC110 owners are finding port replicators and floppy drives hard to come by these days. This rather makes the task of installing software onto the PC110 seem impossible, but if you've got access to another PC with suitable PCMCIA slots, you're in business! This page explains the procedure for installing Win95 onto the PC110 in this manner.

You need

1x PC110
1x PCMCIA hard drive
1x PC with PCMCIA slots

The procedure

  1. Enter Easy-Setup on the PC110 (<F1> at power-on)
  2. Set the startup sequence to FDD-1 HDD-1 PCMCIA
  3. Reboot the PC110, it boots into DOS on the 4MB Flash drive.
  4. The PCMCIA drive should be visible as D: - SYS it.
  5. Copy SMARTDRV.EXE and HIMEM.SYS to D:. Make up a CONFIG.SYS that loads HIMEM.SYS and an AUTOEXEC.BAT that loads SMARTDRV C+ (to enable write-caching)
  6. Issue the command PS2 _@ATA PRIMARY
  7. Shut down PC110 & eject PCMCIA drive - place this in other PC.
  8. At other PC, copy the Win95 installation onto the PCMCIA drive.
  9. Enter Easy-Setup again on the PC110, and change the startup sequence to FDD-1 PCMCIA HDD-1
  10. Replace the PCMCIA drive in the PC110 and reboot.
  11. Your PC110 should boot from the PCMCIA drive, with SMARTDRV loaded.
  12. Find the SETUP.EXE from wherever you left the Win95 installation files and run it.
  13. Periodically prod the PC110 over the next hour and a half as it asks questions between copying files and configuring itself.
  14. Once Windows 95 is installed,  shut down the PC110 and eject the PCMCIA drive.
  15. Reboot the PC110, into DOS from the 4MB Flash drive.
  16. Issue the command PS2 _@ATA SECONDARY
  17. Shut down, insert the PCMCIA drive, and reboot into Windows 95.

Ensuring that write-caching is enabled in step 5 will halve the time needed to perform the 1st sequence (text-based) in the install of Win95. Step 6 temporarily disables the Flash controller (in the hope that Win95 won't find the Flash drive and mess up the partition table/boot sector), and step 16 undoes this. Note that the visibility of PCMCIA drives is controlled by the startup sequence.

If you want to know more about these steps, have a look at the following technical notes:
 

There's also more tips on speeding up the install in the next section.
 

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Written by Daniel Basterfield. Images found on the internet. Enjoy!