Recently an old Compaq Evo N160 laptop had a hard disk crashed. Worse still, the CDROM drive was not working. So how do you install back the Windows 2000 Pro on this laptop. I only had a working floppy drive and working USB ports but the laptop does not boot from the USB drive.
To install it, I first used another PC to copy the Windows 2000 Pro CD contents into a thumb drive.
Then I created a bootable MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disk. I copied over the following files to enable the laptop to access the thumb drive from DOS:
himem.sys - you can get these from the Windows 98se PC
format.com
fdisk.com
smartdrv.exe
usbaspi.sys - search the Internet
di1000dd.sys - search the Internet
Create a config.sys file on the floppy with the following contents:
device=himem.sys /testmem:off
devicehigh=usbaspi.sys
devicehigh=di1000dd.sys
LASTDRIVE = Z
Plug in the thumb drive and boot off the floppy from the N160.
Then, you will need to partition and format the hard disk (on FAT you can only get upto 2GB in the partition) using fdisk and format.
You will need to reboot the PC again.
Run the smartdrv program.
A:> smartdrv
Next, go into the thumb drive (which should be drive D:).
A:> D:
D:> cd i386
Then run:
D:> winnt
The Windows 2000 Pro installation should start. During the Windows installation, you will need to convert the existing 2GB partition to NTFS or alternatively, create a new NTFS Partitition to install the Windows 2000 OS.
Then you are done.
