[Harrysathome]

Hi folks.
I want to reinstall acompaq laptop. its an old machine which hasbeen overloaded with winxp. The laptop has no floppy or cd rom drive. it does have usb and ethernet. It can boot from usb and i think it can from ethernet.
The question is how do i install an earlier version of windows? My genuine win98 cd has a setup.exe as does my genuine win2000 install cd.
I have a usb hard drive and a 128Mb usb drive. Can i use these to install the o/s?
I understand that compaq are tricky by developing their laptops with hidden partitions that hold recovery info and that if the hdd is completely reformated you lose all this info. It is possible that this hdd has been reformatted in the past but i don't know for sure.
The laptop is a Compaq Evo N400c.
Thanks, Harry

[mrss]

You should look in the Compaq CMOS/BIOS screen to see if it has the options to boot off a USB CD drive. If so, could you make a boot CD and boot? Then fdisk and format the C drive with it. Finally swap in the windows CD and install windows. Before you start though, you really want to find all the needed win98 drivers for your Compaq. Otherwise, it won't be much good at all in win98se. Use a CD to copy the drivers to the drive before starting windows.

If you don't have USB boot, is the hard drive easily taken out? You could attach an IDE adapter and use another PC to clean the disk, do a SYS command so it will boot, and copy the win98 files and driver files to the drive. Then re-install the drive, let it boot to a C: prompt, and install windows from the hard drive.