empty laptop, no CD / floppy

  • Thread starter Thread starter briansmccabe
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briansmccabe

Hello -


I acquired a laptop from work that was going to be tossed out.
There's no OS on it, and curiously enough, the laptop not only lacks a
floppy and a CD-ROM, but it does not _appear_ to have any place on it
in which a removable drive would go. So naturally I am very curious how
one would go about installing an OS on it.

It's a Dell Latitude LS, model PP01S.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks in advance -

CV
 
Hello -


I acquired a laptop from work that was going to be tossed out.
There's no OS on it, and curiously enough, the laptop not only lacks a
floppy and a CD-ROM, but it does not _appear_ to have any place on it
in which a removable drive would go. So naturally I am very curious how
one would go about installing an OS on it.

It's a Dell Latitude LS, model PP01S.

Any Suggestions?
Click to expand...

Does it have USB or FireWire?

If so, there's plenty of external drives that will connect to those
ports and let you boot from them.
 
It does have a USB port -- but with no OS installed, what expectation
would I have of the machine even recognizing the USB-attached CD drive?


Thanks for your assistance!

-CV
 
It does have a USB port -- but with no OS installed, what expectation
would I have of the machine even recognizing the USB-attached CD drive?
Click to expand...

All I know is that some computers can boot from a CD in a CD-ROM
attached by USB. This is much more common in laptops than in desktops
(the only desktops I know that do it are Macs). Check the laptop's BIOS
and see what kind of options are in the boot order.
 
The only two items of note in the BIOS in terms of bootable discs are
Hard Drive and ATAPI CD Rom Drive.
 
Go to Dell and look for literature or a manual for this beast. The manual
should give some insight as to how it's expected the OS (for its time) to be
installed.



Jan Alter
(e-mail address removed)
or
(e-mail address removed)12.pa.us
 
Ok, so I went to Dell's site and found an owner's manual of sorts. It
indicates that the laptop is compatible with an "external media bay."
This appears to be an external CD-ROM drive. I have no idea if I need
Dell's specific drive and if so, where to acquire one (a brief www
search turned up nada), or if any external CD drive will do. I think I
may leave it in the hands of the local shop and see where they get with
it. Anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks again -

CV
 
It does have a USB port -- but with no OS installed, what expectation
would I have of the machine even recognizing the USB-attached CD drive?
Click to expand...


The expectation would be that you look in the bios for
applicable settings, and you try one to see if it works.

The main question is, what abilities and hardware do you
have at your disposal to aid you towards your goal?

If all else fails, pull out the hard drive and use a
laptop-desktop IDE adapter to hook the drive up to a desktop
system. Create a 2nd partition (it's size depending on your
need for a 2nd partition later, if you would find that of
benefit in your regular uses of system then make it bigger
rather than smaller).

Format both as FAT32, make primary partition active and
bootable w/system (dos) files & Smartdrive on it. Put (I
assume windows?) OS installation files on the 2nd partition,
by copying whole /386 folder form windows CD to the 2nd HD
parititon. Also put the driver files on this 2nd
parititon, and if you need some kind of ZIP program to
decompress them (depending on the operating system's
integral abilities), also put that on 2nd partition. At the
very least, make sure you have a connectivity driver, like
modem or network adapter, so if some other driver doesn't
work you can network the system to get the rest of the
drivers instead of having to pull the HDD and recopy them
(though if you had a USB drive of some sort, that's another
alternative once a supportive OS is installed).

Boot the laptop to DOS with drive installed, load
smartdrive, install windows from 2nd partition (run
/386/winnt.exe).
 
It's most probable that you could up an external USB CD-ROM drive and get
satisfaction. My feeling though is that at this point in time any laptop
computer needs a CD-R/DVD drive to get even reasonable satisfaction of the
computer experience.
Decide what you hope to accomplish with this thing before dropping any
money into it as you could easily start dropping C notes to get it doing
what you'd like instead of starting with something more versatile in the
first place.
If you simply enjoy the experimentation, well that's a different story.
 
Hello -


I acquired a laptop from work that was going to be tossed
out.
There's no OS on it, and curiously enough, the laptop not only
lacks a
floppy and a CD-ROM, but it does not _appear_ to have any
place on it
in which a removable drive would go. So naturally I am very
curious how
one would go about installing an OS on it.

It's a Dell Latitude LS, model PP01S.

Any Suggestions?

Thanks in advance -

CV
Click to expand...

Thes apear to be similar, or the exact drives you need:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6810367114&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MEWA:IT&rd=1

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=6811743141&rd=1&sspagename=STRK:MEWA:IT&rd=1
 
I found one of those on eBay after posting last. Thanks for taking the
time to find these for me, and thanks to all others who assisted.

My primary interest in salvaging this notebook was because I am
interested in having a machine that is dedicated to the home theater.
All I need it to do is map some drives to other machines on my network
and play video / audio into my home theater. So the machine doesn't
need to have any semblance of a hard drive, really. Space-wise, a
laptop is ideal but I am becoming increasingly convinced that this one
is simply not going to get it done.
 
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