Hp T5710

After I succeeded in installing NetBSD on the HP thin client t5710, I wanted to see how well it would work under Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition (SE).

Thin Client HP t5710 - Front view

The biggest problem you run into when trying such an installation is that, in general, you need a floppy disk to boot the Windows 98 SE setup. To perform the installation from a USB stick I followed the steps described in detail in an excellent online article by James MacKenzie. As floppy disk image I used a custom image, instead of the one recommended in the above mentioned article, because I was not able to have the internal IDE flash disk remapped to C:. By using the custom boot floppy disk, I could to use FDISK and FORMAT to partition the IDE flash disk, format it and make it bootable by specifying the /S parameter, that is: FORMAT D: /S. Then I copied the win98 folder to the newly formatted disk, rebooted and started the setup from that folder.

I recently bought several old HP thin clients t5710 on Ebay, mostly because I wanted to install FreeDOS and other DOSes on bare metal. And since each box did cost only about 17 EUR, I thought it might be a good idea to give them a try.

Thin Client HP t5710 - Front view

Thin Client HP t5710 - Rear view with the ports