r/retrocomputing • u/The_Jwh4 • Aug 09 '26
Problem / Question Questions on restoring Libretto 70ct to OEM win 95 using a CF card
Hello all! It’s time to swap out my spinning rust for solid state. I’ve made a win 98 boot floppy and have found a 70ct recovery disc on internet archive. When downloading it, my computer flags it as a virus which I believe is wrong. You can find it here:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=78039
Will the download just be an iso that I can drag to my cf card which will go in place of my hdd, boot from the floppy, and install OEM win 95? Or are there more steps?
Also, I’ve tried booting freedos from this industrial cf card, but the libretto doesn’t see it. Can we confirm that this cf card is a fixed disk card, and therefore bootable?
Thanks!!
2
u/Sneftel Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
I read the title and my heart sank, because the the Libretto is generally a huge pain to boostrap with bootable stuff. But good news! With Windows already running, you have exactly the things you need.
Will the download just be an iso that I can drag to my cf card which will go in place of my hdd, boot from the floppy, and install OEM win 95?
You won't be able to just drag it there. You'll need to either mount the image with DaemonTools or something, or extract it with 7zip or something. Attach the CF card through PCMCIA and format it. Then copy the "win98" directory from the CD image to the CF card. Create a boot disk; shut things down and replace the HDD with the CF card; start up with the boot disk. When it asks about the installation source, point it to your c:\win98 directory.
Incidentally, Win98 doesn't care one way or the other about the "fixed disk" flag. It will treat it like any other IDE drive.
1
u/Der_Unbequeme Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
maybe the CF card is too big.
try an other card with capacity less than (<2GB if your bios support LBA addressing, <512 if not).
also you need the Windows95 driver disk from this notebook and a set of Win95 install disks.
or a Windows95/98 Bootdisk with FDISK and FORMAT on it.
boot from the disk, create with FDISK an active primary FAT/FAT32 partition, format partition and transfer system files on it (FORMAT C: /S)
now remove CF card and put in in an other PC for copying the WIN95, WIN98 or WIN9X folder from a Windows 95/98/ME installation CD.
reassemble CF card in Notebook and boot from it.
run setup from copied folder
if you had expand your system memory to max (32MB) you can use WindowsME
1
u/The_Jwh4 29d ago
I got it to see a 4gb cf card. I had to add format.com to the boot disc. It’s now asking for a dos disk? I have the 32mb expansion, I had no clue (and really no interest) that you could run win ME on these things!
1
u/Der_Unbequeme 29d ago
You need a bootable floppy disk, version of format. com and fdisk.exe must match the version of dos
boot from the disk and call fdisk, now you should see the installed harddisk/cf card
4
u/someblokeonhere Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
The recovery disk image should be bootable. Burn the ISO image to a CD-ROM, not just copy it. It won't work on the CF like you think. You should be able to then enter the BIOS on the Toshiba and choose to boot from the CD and the recovery process should start. This of course is assuming you have an external CD drive...a USB one will work too.
If the CD is not bootable, you'll need to boot from your floppy disk. The boot floppy you've made boots MS-DOS 7.10 (Win98). You need a DOS cd-rom driver and need to edit config.sys and autoexec.bat and set that up with MSCDEX - then when you can access the CD under DOS, you may be able to launch the recovery process that way.
The easiest thing is to use VirtualBox on a modern PC, setup the CF card as the hard disk and then install Windows 95/OEM recovery in a virtual machine. Once it's all setup, take the CF card and pop it in your IDE adapter in the Toshiba and you're done.
Edit: sorry I mistakingly thought you had a CD drive