[kwlug-disc] FreeDOS

[Eric Gerlach]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 10:16:45PM -0400, Oksana Goertzen wrote:
> Hello Everyone,
> 
> I have in my possession an old PIII Toshiba Tablet.  It has no cd rom in it
> and it doesn't boot from USB.  I need to reinstall Windows on it.  I'm
> thinking of taking the hard drive out, partitioning it with Linux, making
> one
> partition bootable, loading FreeDOS on that partition and putting the
> install files for the XP Tablet edition on there and setting it up again.
> Has anyone attempted anything like this?  Does this sound like it might
> work?  

As unsolicited said, it will work just fine.  You can even format the
*entire* disk as FAT32, copy the files on, and Windows XP should give
you an option to convert the partition to NTFS during the install.  So
you don't even *need* separate partitions.

> It also supports PXE boot (something I've never worked with,
> but will be soon - however I want to set it up before then).  :)

This isn't really that hard, actually.  dnsmasq can do most aspects of
it, and unattended-gui can do the rest... hmmm... I don't know if
installing Windows using Linux is an appropriate talk for a LUG... seems
a little risqué.

Cheers,

Eric