Loading an OS on MW-520

Kleptein · Post by **Kleptein** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:30 am

I bought a couple MW-520s a few months back and am just getting around to trying them. Apparently they were wiped clean before they were sold, no operating system at all - just a blank hard drive. I don't see any boot options in the BIOS to tell it to boot from a PCMCIA card so I'm stuck at this point.

Has anyone ever loaded an operating system from scratch on one of these? Does it have a standard IDE hard drive inside that I could just remove and slave to another computer?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hoseman292 · Post by **Hoseman292** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 6:44 am

Will it boot to a command prompt? If so, you might try to laplink it to another computer and transfer a zipped version of Windows or MS-DOS. I've done this many times with older Thinkpad laptops without floppies and have had some success.

I started with a DOS Laplink program I downloaded awhile back.
Then I transferred PKUNZIP which is in DOS as well.
Lastly I transferred Windows 95 or DOS which I sent as a zipped file.

Once everything was transferred, I unzipped the operating system using PKUNZIP.exe and began my installation from the hard drive.

I hope this helps.

Tim
N3WIR
Silver Spring Maryland

giantcake · Post by **giantcake** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 8:11 am

To start, you can go here to get drivers and so on and some good operations info on the unit.

mw520.motorola.com

Did you get your units off of ebay?

Let me know if you need more help, I worked on some a year ago for my trucks and it was fairly straight forward. Haven't had to do much to them since.

Basically, used a desktop machine to load DOS, then used a Backpack parallel port CDROM drive to load the rest. Good idea to get all the drivers you can off the MW520 site first.

If you like Linux, they have a SuSE linux image also on there for trial.

Good Luck!

~Steve

giantcake · Post by **giantcake** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 8:22 am

Also, this is good info for loading an OS.

http://mw520.motorola.com/MW520/Docs/PD ... imr458.pdf

~Steve

Threeshot223 · Post by **Threeshot223** » Sun Nov 21, 2004 12:35 pm

What I've done is bought a little 2.5-3.5" adapter (like 3 bucks) and used my desktop to copy Win98 to it.

Removing the HD is a snap. Unscrew the screws on the top cover, lift it up, and the HD is mounted on the cover. Disconnect the little connector and then unscrew the HD from it's mount.