installing windows 98 on pentium 2

NewGuy

ok lets start from the begining...

my skool was throwing away old computers...so our class took some of them home. i took 2 of em (alot of them went in the dump though). 1 works, the other doesn't.

so i think i have to install windows, cuz it says "operating system not found" therefore i got windows 98 SE, but it was 730 mb (.mdf file)... and i cant burn it onto a cd, cuz the cd's i have are only 700mb. I cant burn it onto a dvd either...cuz the old computer only has a cd rom.

then i got windows 98 SE that was 120 mb. and its an exe file (but runs with Winzip self extractor)...i burned it onto a cd and put it inside the old computer...but it doesn't run. I dont no how to install the thing on the hard drive. Any ideas?


thx for the help

mmonnin

Well first you will need a valid CD key of some OS instead of some downloaded version you got somewhere.

And look here to burn .mdf files.
http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200409/1094539973.html

To be able to install an OS from a CD, the CD will need to be bootable to have a 98 boot disk that you can copy to a floppy. Thats free and you can get that about anywhere.

NewGuy

so wat ur saying is i have to have the windows 98 os and the bootable stuff on the same cd rite. cuz i have a win 98 boot disk...so all i have to do is put those files on the cd with the os? and when i do that...will the cd run by itself?

NewGuy

ok...this is what i did... i put win98 boot disk on floppy and win 98 OS on cd. i put cd and floppy in the computer. the boot disk 'loaded' and said the c drive doesn't have a valid FAT or FAT32 partition...and told me to run FDISK. but wen i did it said "no fixed diskspresent"

anyway ... it was a DOS disk. so i tried running setup.exe from the d: drive (which is setup for win98), but it didn't read the disk. i even tried the dir command, and it didn't read the disk. everytim i tried doing something involving the d drive, it always gave this message

CDR101: Not ready reading drive D
Abort, Retry, Fail?

then i thought of installing the driver for the cdrom. so i took the cd rom out and cheked the model number, searched for the driver, and installed it on the computer...but still said the same thing.

how do i get the thing to read the disk???

muddocktor

First of all, you will need to fdisk the hard drive with the win98 boot disk and make an active partition on the hard drive. After doing this, you will need to format that partition, so the OS can install. Win98 isn't nearly as smart as Win2K/WinXP when setting itself up and doesn't allow you to do thse operations during the install process.

Once you have a partition set and active on the hard drive and then have the partition formatted in FAT32, you should be able to install the Win98.

NewGuy

but everytime i run FDISK, it says "no fixed disks present"? I changed it to c: drive. Maybe this is happening because it creates a ramdrive? this is exactly from the readme file to explain a ramdrive:

==========================================================
The RAMDrive is created during the processing of the Config.sys file and is
2MB in size. The Ramdrive is created using system RAM to emulate a physical
Hard Disk. Without creating the RAMdrive, we would not have enough space on
a single 1.44 meg floppy disk to contain all the diagnostic tools as well
as the CD-Rom drivers.

Warning
Since the RAMDrive is created during the processing of the Config.sys file
and uses System RAM, it is only temporary. It will disappear if you restart
your computer normally.
==========================================================

now the c: drive is the ramdrive...not the actual hard drive. I also tried formatting the c drive from the boot disk, but it didn't let me, i guess i can only format the a drive...

im still a noob at this stuff ... srry if i'm annoying u guys