We have it so easy now.

[NightrainSrt4]

I found an old Dell CPx and decided I would install windows 98 on it. The cd won't boot. Still won't boot. Ahh crap, now I remember. Make a Dos floppy, FDISK, format C: / s, then get then I can install from the CD.

Now we just toss the disk in and it does it all for us pretty much. Click, click, done. The last time I went through this I was like 12, lmfao.

Who knows what the heck I will do with this. I've got an old Dragon's Lair CD that won't run on new computers maybe I can finally get it working. Aside from that I have no clue.

Going through this again just reminding me how simple things have gotten lately, and I do not mind one bit at all.

EDIT: Lame. The laptop can only have either the floppy or the CD drive in. It won't read my USB floppy drive. When I try to install with CD drivers it can't find the drive because only the floppy is plugged in, so it refuses to install them. So I can't get to the CD drive in DOS because it doesn't know it exists. Bleh. Plus portions of the keyboard aren't working.

EDIT2: I give up. Nothing I do can get this disk to boot. Not worth wasting any more time for something I could just run a VM for. Bleh.

[crenn]

Does the laptop have a LAN port that supports PXE?

[AmEv]

If you could figure out how to use USB CD drivers....
I know there is also a Dell parallel-floppy adapter.

[NightrainSrt4]

It wouldn't be a problem if my win 98 cd was one of the bootable ones. I can get win 98 dos installed to the hard drive, but once I swap to the cd and reboot, it boots up into it, but I can't cd into the cd drive to start the installer. I've tried every drive letter. It just doesn't know a cd is there.

I'll probably just go back and install windows 2000. I know the disk I have for that is bootable. It's not that I couldn't get it working, I'm just not sure it is worth the effort to do so.

I don't know if it supports PXE. It doesn't have a lan port directly in the laptop. I received it with a PCcard slot lan port/modem. I'm not sure spending time on that would be worth it. I can't do much that needs a command line on the laptop as half the keys don't work, lol.

We definitely have it so much easier. Put disk in, click, click, done!

[x88x]

Heheh, try this.

1) Install on spare old desktop that can have both a CD and floppy drive hooked up.
2) Don't install any drivers on first boot. In fact, go into the hardware manager and delete all devices.
3) Use clonezilla (or similar) to clone the disk to the laptop drive (or just use the laptop drive with an adapter for the first two steps).
4) Put the laptop drive back in the laptop.
5) Spend several hours wading through driver hell.
6) Enjoy.

[AmEv]

Wait, Windows 98 isn't MoBo specific like XP/Vista/7 are.


But yes, don't install any drivers. So you could just have the lappy HDD into the IDE port (assuming you have an adapter....)

Then again, you WILL love the fact that, by default, Win98 is set to reboot COMPLETELY when ANY change is made.



Sometimes, it just quit to DOS and back to Windows. I liked it when it did that.

[Konrad]

I recall a Win98 issue: partway through installation it would reboot and need to finish installing from CD ... before the CD drivers were themselves installed. Best fix is to simply boot from a DOS floppy, FDISK, FORMAT C:, xcopy the entire CD (at least the CAB files) onto hard drive, then install from there. If you use a bare-bones PC, or one with i9xx or newer chipset (which Win98 can't support) then your driver configuration issues (after transferring Win98 hard drive into intended box) will be minimal.

Incidentally, didja know that MINI.CAB is basically a Win3.x shell, you can play solitaire while Windows is installing?

If you're planning on a multiboot then install the Win98 before you install XP/Vista/Win7. Best Win98 file system is FAT32 (FAT16 is too useless) with at least 4GB partition size.

Dragon's Lair works fine for me, running DOSBox in Win7. Gotta run the SNDSETUP.EXE utility first if you want audio, of course. People say it also works in WINE, though I haven't confirmed.

MSFN Forums is where all the active Win9x diehards hang, they've archived all the Microsoft Windows 98 Updates, and have produced some Win9x Service Packs (compatibility fixes, vulnerability fixes, updates, etc) which actually keep Win9x up to date with recent hardware and security issues, even after Microsoft officially discontinued support. Install your chipset drivers, then DirectX 9.0d (the latest version which will install on Win9x) to take care of your graphics ... don't expect killer performance.

[AmEv]

Oh yeah!


Anyone else remember C:\Windows\Options\Cabs\ in Win98? Basically a rip of 98 CD to your HDD.

[NightrainSrt4]

Ok. I went back and tried again. I used a boot image and the CD image to create a bootable CD for windows 98. I must have been using the wrong options as every time I tried I just got a blinking underscore. Finally got the right options and got a bootable CD.

Then I couldn't get access to the files on the CD drive. I could see them with "dir E:\", but no amount of "cd E:\" or "chdir E:\" and any variations of switches or not would get me in there. It would show the prompt but then go right back to A:\.

Eventually I figured out I just needed to type "E:\", lmfao. Then I had access to setup and it is installing now. A lot of work and trying to remember things for something I will probably fiddle with for a few mere moments, lmfao.

[NightrainSrt4]

And now that it is installed no amount of nostalgia makes me want to go and hunt down all the missing drivers for everything.

I should have known, lol. Maybe some time down the line I will put windows 2000 back on it, the default drivers seemed to work much better.

[AmEv]

support.dell.com
Home users
Drivers and Downloads
Service Tag (should be on bottom of laptop); if no tag, model number.

[Konrad]

Make yourself a handy Win9x DOS boot disk while you've got the system running ... for next time.

[NightrainSrt4]

AmEv, thanks for reminding me. I put it out of my head because I figured that didn't go back that far. When I get some time I'll check it out.

The problem wasn't the boot disk. I had already used a win9x boot disk the first time. The problem was that I could only have either a floppy or a cd-rom drive in the laptop. When I was using a win9x boot floppy it wouldn't let me load the cd drivers because it could find no cd drive, because there physically wasn't. So it couldn't find the cd. Then when I tried a win9x cd boot disk, it wouldn't find the win98 cd when I swapped disks out, using ram drive or not.

In the end I extracted the contents of the windows98 cd, then I shoved the boot disk onto a cd and told the cd to be bootable and put the contents of the windows98 cd into a folder. Put CD in, boots up into the boot disk, FDISK, format, open cd directory, navigate to windows98 folder, setup. In the end that worked. Life would have been much simpler had I had both a floppy and cd drive in the computer, or if my windows 98 was one of the bootable ones.

In the end I'll probably just install windows 2000 down the line.

[xr4man]

i can only guess that you are using an early win98 disk. i have always had no problems at all booting from a win98se disk and having it load cd drivers and installing.

or did miss something in an earlier post that explains that?