Comment on Help with Gateway Solo 2550
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 week agoIt only has a modem port. Could get a lan port with a pcmcia card.
Would that method work to then clear out win 2k? I dont really need it.
I wonder if the usb ports are dead. Even if I plug in a mouse with an led, it doesn’t light up or anything. All I have left is parallel or serial for getting data into it. Or the floppy drive.
hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Well I guess you can then wipe the 2k partition and install dos/win9x and boot into that and remove the second partition, not too sure how partition management works on win9x/dos though.
A better solution might be to pull out the hard drive and installing dos there. This way you can also check if the drives got any bad sectors and also dump the current data so you can restore win2k later. (especially if this is a factory install, the drivers you have installed now may be impossible to find later on)
Is the hard drive easily accessible? Laptop pata to usb doesn’t cost much.
Even if you install a pcmcia lan card, you might need to install the driver for that (lol). btw i’m sure you did already but do check if the usb is enabled in bios.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Sure, I may do that , the drive is a bit noisy but doesn’t sound like its failing. Its easy to get to. At least.
This pc originally came with win 98. Luckily all the drivers are avilable on the archive.
I worried about that with the pcm card needing drivers but decided to gamble for 20 dollars.
I cannot see any bios option for usb. Its just odd they seem to not have any power output either.
hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Nice, then the driver wouldn’t be an issue.
btw I just remembered using the format tool in WinXP (My Computer -> right click drive -> format) to create a bootable MS-DOS (think it was the winme one - so ms-dos 8?) floppy/usb. Not sure if it’s on 2K too, would be worth checking. If it also works on an internal drive maybe you could partition the drive and install DOS on the second drive without any external media.