Need Your Help Installing Win98

Nostalgia

Hi to all!

I can't get no... (Win98)
I can't get no... (Win98)
and I've tried
I've tried,
I've tried,
I've tried..
Hey hey hey,
that's what I say:

Hardware:
MB: ECS (Elitegroup) K7S5A Pro (V5.­0) (SiS® 735 chipset)
1 x 128 MB SDRAM (tried 1GB DDR, too)
Graphics: Diamond Stealth 64 PCI (tried AGP card, too)
1,44 MB Floppy
80GB LBA IDE HAD as master on IDE1
Teac 40x CDROM (Writer) as Master on IDE2
all detected by BIOS

Software:
Win98SE iso from this site, burned to CD
Win98SE boot floppy from this site written with dd

What happens?
1. Floppy boots right away
"Startup Menu"
->Start Win98 Setup from CD-ROM
blue screen: "to Setup Windows now, press Enter"
->Enter
"Setup is now going to perform a routine check on your system"
"To continue, press Enter"
->Enter
...one second later..
"remove all floppies"
"press any key to restart"
-> 1. endless loop

Tried the same stuff with a system from 2005 (Intel dual core). Same result.

Hope that anyone can help

02k-guy

My first thought: Don't use a menu driven program from the floppy.
Rathr, boot from floppy, escape to DOS prompt, navigate to the CD-ROm, and execute setup.exe from that location.

d:
cd\
cd win98
setup /is

There are many setup switches that can be used with 9x versions, including logging - so you can trace what's going on.

http://www.thpc.info/how/switches9x.html

Nostalgia

Thank you for the quick reply, 02k-guy!
Your advice was very helpful.
I already had started setup from dos-prompt, and tried lots of options - but not /is, that was the winner!
Setup didn't like my gparted-partitioned hd. I had to use dos-fdisk from floppy.
Fdisk recognised just 10 of the 80GB of the disk, but I could fix this with gparted.
I now have Win98 installed, first time since I guess 2001 or so!
But I have forgotten a lot of the special Win95/98/MS-DOS knowledge...
This is a great board and a great site!

albertopuente

This might seem too obvious, but have your created a primary partition and formatted with FDISK? Remember this is DOS, the disk needs to be pre-formatted.

Nostalgia

albertopuente, I do not know what you mean with "preformatted".

In my first attempt, I used gparted to create a msdos partition table, and a 2GB primary partition. Formatted that fat16 with gparted.
It seems that setup.exe requires a special dos-signature (in the mbr?) to work. (Win2k install does not)
I then partitioned the HD with fdisk, and setup proposed to format it, which I allowed. It is fat32 now.

calvinb

Is your BIOS updated? The fact it's seeing only 10 GB is common with older BIOSes. Alternatively, check your disk geometry to see if that's reasonable.

altracker9

You might also try using older partitioning software with W98 systems.
I only use Partition Magic 7.0 (avail on WinWorldpc) on my W98 installs.
I've never had a compatiblity problem. PM7 supports up to 80GB hard drives.

My W98 systems won't boot from CD, and PM7 will create emergency
boot disks that boot from 3.5" FDD.

albertopuente

Use the FDISK utility from MS-DOS, it's pretty simple and straight forward if you follow the instructions.

Or else, try this:

- install MS-DOS 6.22 first form the floppys available in winworld
- then install Win98

That should work.

Let me know if you need more help.

02k-guy

Nostalgia wrote:

....
I already had started setup from dos-prompt, and tried lots of options - but not /is, that was the winner!
....

You got it working - that's good! :cheers:

Twiggy

albertopuente wrote:

Use the FDISK utility from MS-DOS, it's pretty simple and straight forward if you follow the instructions.

Or else, try this:

- install MS-DOS 6.22 first form the floppys available in winworld
- then install Win98

That should work.

Let me know if you need more help.

He already has win98 installed,

However just to add, he'd have to install a CD driver for ms-dos 6.22 as it's not built in.

P.S: I installed win98 from MS-DOS 7.10 from this site. Good it came with CD drivers.