On 01/21/2017 08:12 PM, Lee wrote:

Thanks for that link, I'm getting some too, too cheap to pass up.

Well, I guess that will be a reason for me to stay in the group. See
how well or poorly the HD performs for all of those getting one.

Being that old then the main problem may in fact deal with the BIOS
not presenting the USB stick properly. Installing the last BIOS
update may help immensely with that issue.

I've been suspecting this all along. Unfortunately, the laptop itself
didn't support USB in the BIOS at all, even with the final BIOS update
back in 2007. Just to get initial Win 98 installation files to start, I
had to use a program called "plop" on a CD first to load in a USB
driver. I've thought quite possibly that the USB driver the program
loads isn't a very good one. There may be other programs that would
have installed a better driver, but I don't have time to investigate it.

And it may come down to
the choice of USB stick used as well. Some will do FAT16 and some
won't - just two other areas that may have been the problem if
further studies or efforts down that road are attempted. I may try
this myself just for grins. Best of luck.

I did try a couple of different sticks and one did seem to get further
along than the other. I was also hoping to find a much smaller stick in
my inventory other than the smallest 8 GB ones I had, something on the
order of 2 GB or so, but I couldn't find one.

I may try the process again on one of my much more modern laptops that
have no USB BIOS issues, or even try out the process by setting up a VM
on my XP desktop. Already have several VM's running on that one set up
through Virtualbox. All of this takes time though, something I'm
running out of, but may have time over the next week or so.

Dob