Preparing your laptop to install Windows

For Windows 2000 and Windows XP simply insert the Windows CD into the machine and follow the on screen instructions.

There are four stages to installing Windows 95 and Windows 98 on a laptop hard drive.  The first of these is to partition the hard drive.  The second is to format the hard drive.  the third is to install the CD drivers (only required on older machines).  The final stage is to install Windows and any additional drivers that may be needed.

Please note that if your laptop drive is already formatted the instructions below do not apply.

All details below are provided free of charge for both customers and non customers.  No liability is accepted for any damage or data loss resulting from the misuse of this information. 

Why reinvent the wheel?  If your laptop was supplied with a recovery CD then use it!  Conversely we suggest that if you have a Windows startup disk or restore disk from another machine you ignore them and make your own boot disk.

1. Partition the hard drive.

You will need to boot the laptop from a floppy disk which has been formatted as a system disk.  You can make this disk by selecting the COPY SYSTEM FILES option from the format window.  Make sure you are formatting the A: drive not the hard drive (especially if it's not your computer!)

Onto this disk you should copy a number of files from the \WINDOWS\COMMAND directory of another Windows 95 computer.

Hint: If you are unable to get this far without further explanation we strongly recommend that you consider getting someone more experienced to assist you before continuing.

Boot the laptop from this disk and type FDISK and press return.  Select YES(Y) if asked if you want to use large disk support.

Using the DISPLAY PARTITION INFORMATION option check to confirm the laptop has not already got a partition on it.

Use CREATE PARTITION to create a PRIMARY DOS Partition and set it to be active, following the prompts on the screen.

Once the partition has been created you MUST exit FDISK and reboot the computer before continuing.  (You may create several partitions if you wish but you must have an active primary partition to install Windows).

Reboot the laptop, still from the floppy boot disk.

Type "FORMAT C: /S" and press return to format the new drive and follow the prompts on the screen.

Once the drive is formatted you need to install CD drivers.  For most laptops (Pentium & above) you can use a standard or universal ATAPI driver.  For some machines you will need to download the manufacturers driver from their web site.  As part of this process it often helps to copy MSCDEX to your hard drive.

Once the CD drivers have installed you can remove the floppy drive and reboot the laptop from hard drive, which should now be ready for a standard Windows installation.

The procedure described above will work with Windows 98 equally well, but the floppy boot disk MUST be prepared on a Windows 98 machine.

Many users do not realise that the Windows 98 CD is bootable and that many later laptops (mainly PII's or later) will boot directly from this CD.  Your BIOS settings may allow you to select boot from CD as an option (see Laptop BIOS Settings).

If you are able to boot from CD then the process described above is automated and all you need to do is watch!  You may wish to read Installing Windows Tips before doing this as a slight variation on the automated procedure produces a far smoother installation.

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