Installing NT without a floppy drive

2005-06-20 If you have a PowerPC Thinkpad with no external floppy drive and you want to install Windows NT, it possible to do so. Normally you need the floppy drive to load the ARC boot loader floppy disk. However, there is a neat alternative trick you can use if you do not have the floppy drive:
  1. Download the arc boot image from the IBM FTP site.
  2. Use linux/unix dd to write it onto an external SCSI drive on an alternative working system.
  3. Attach the external SCSI drive to the PowerPC Thinkpad you want to load NT onto.
  4. Boot from the external hard drive (get into the firmware/CMOS settings to change the boot device).
  5. Go to "Select installation and setup services" -> "Advanced setup menu" -> "Disk partition management service".
  6. Make 2 extra FAT paritions: one 2MB partition for NT Loader and the rest of the disk for NTFS (which you can convert from FAT->NTFS later during the install).
  7. Insert the NT CD.
  8. Go back to the ARC main menu.
  9. Select "Run maintenance program".
  10. Enter "CD:\ppc\setupldr".
  11. Installation starts.

Thanks to Tero Kaarlela for the tip.
 

Please e-mail  aixtp20@tecnopolis.ca if you have any comments!

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