Epson EHT-400C OS Installation (w/o Floppy or Disk-Drive)

[the|Gamer]

Hello together,
I have two EHT-400C 486 DX2 Tablet PCs here, in one of the two the HDD fried and I now bought an CF->PCMCIA Adapter. It also gets recognized by the Bios but it gives me the weirdest error messages (which is my proof that it gets recognized as a HDD). And why is it throwing those errors? Cause I try to use a Windows installation that has been done in a VM.

I guess for the i486 DX2 there is a diffrent code to load when booting and so it does not execute it and says things like "Operation System not found" but in my Language (German) and I am trying to load an German version so this error comes from the Bootloader on the Disk or it throws "Disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter" also in German.

Then I put the CF Card from my CF -> IDE which is working fine with Windows 98 in my Pentium MMX Laptop and it gives me weird ASCII symbols. As I know that the ASCII symbols Error definitly comes from the Bootloader... I need an solution to install Windows 95 to the System without a CD-Rom Drive and without a Floppy disk drive.

I have: CF -> Notebook IDE, Notebook IDE -> USB, CF -> PCMCIA, the Original 170MB Drive (booting Windows for Pen Computing), the old Pentium MMX Laptop with PCMCIA and my Lenovo R500.

It would be really nice if some one could help me

 

[RWallmow]

Hello together,
I have two EHT-400C 486 DX2 Tablet PCs here, in one of the two the HDD fried and I now bought an CF->PCMCIA Adapter. It also gets recognized by the Bios but it gives me the weirdest error messages (which is my proof that it gets recognized as a HDD). And why is it throwing those errors? Cause I try to use a Windows installation that has been done in a VM.

I guess for the i486 DX2 there is a diffrent code to load when booting and so it does not execute it and says things like "Operation System not found" but in my Language (German) and I am trying to load an German version so this error comes from the Bootloader on the Disk or it throws "Disk boot failure insert system disk and press enter" also in German.

Then I put the CF Card from my CF -> IDE which is working fine with Windows 98 in my Pentium MMX Laptop and it gives me weird ASCII symbols. As I know that the ASCII symbols Error definitly comes from the Bootloader... I need an solution to install Windows 95 to the System without a CD-Rom Drive and without a Floppy disk drive.

I have: CF -> Notebook IDE, Notebook IDE -> USB, CF -> PCMCIA, the Original 170MB Drive (booting Windows for Pen Computing), the old Pentium MMX Laptop with PCMCIA and my Lenovo R500.

It would be really nice if some one could help me

What size is the CF card you are using? I am guessing you would need a DDO (like ontrack) for anything larger than a 520MB card. If you are using a CF card larger than 520MB, and formatting on another PC and putting it into the 400c, the "OS Not Found" is pretty normal, since your other device likely supports LBA, where the 400c does not.

 

[the|Gamer]

The CF Card is 4GB but I created an Partion with 1,99GB... so next step is creating a smaller Partition right? And if that ain't working I try finding an compatible Floppy or CD-Drive (is there any?)

 

[RWallmow]

The CF Card is 4GB but I created an Partion with 1,99GB... so next step is creating a smaller Partition right? And if that ain't working I try finding an compatible Floppy or CD-Drive (is there any?)

Just use a 512mb (or smaller) card, its not a partition or OS limit, its a BIOS limit.

 

[the|Gamer]

So now I ordered two CF Cards with 512MB (Industrial) and I have two PCMCIA to CF Card Adaptors one from Delock and one NoName. How to proceed? I only have the Win 3.11 and Windows 95 Setup Files and my Windows 8.1 64-Bit Computer with PCMCIA Slot.

 

[RWallmow]

So now I ordered two CF Cards with 512MB (Industrial) and I have two PCMCIA to CF Card Adaptors one from Delock and one NoName. How to proceed? I only have the Win 3.11 and Windows 95 Setup Files and my Windows 8.1 64-Bit Computer with PCMCIA Slot.

Use HP's "USB Drive" format tool, will make flash media DOS-bootable if you provide it with a dos boot disk image. I know it says USB, but it works with other flash media, like SD and CF just fine usually.

So get the DOS boot image on it, then copy the windows setup files to it, then boot off it on the destination PC, and finally run setup for which ever version of windows you copied over.

EDIT: I should note I have NOT done this on Windows 8, only Windows 7 64-bit, I know Windows 8 is not much different functionally, so its likely to work, but I cant say for certain, please report back if this worked for you.