windows 98 se install questions...

tman

alright first things first, i've never installed 98 se from the cd, i've always used a boot disk & copied the contents of "win98" to the hd & then ran setup.

a mate of mine had xp installed on his pc, that's borked now & he has no xp cd to reinstall from, so he's going back to '98.

my main question is, how easy will it be to get rid of the ntfs partition & create a fat32 one?
does the installer have an option to do this or will he have to fdisk & then format?

i just don't fancy having to talk him through fdisk & all that over the phone...

Sleipnir

Win98 doesn't have the functionality as it can't see NTFS partitions so an fdisk the way to go.
an fdisk is not difficult if you put all the commands in a step-by-step.
Basically you need a 98 boot disk Bootdisk
boot up off it, type fdisk , say yes, then go to "delete partitions"
and delete the non-dos partition.
go to "display partitions" and make sure it says "no partitions" on the disk.
Then reboot, fdisk and yes again, create primary hard disk partition, "do you want to make the max available to this partition blah, blah, blah....." (yes, depending on the size of the disk)
Once it's done, exit fdisk, reboot and then type
format c: from the a:\ prompt

Did I miss a step anyone?

tman

ah well, i know how to do all that already, just don't want to have to explain how to do it over the phone:(

afaik its the full 98 cd, so he should be able to change the boot order in the bios & boot from the cd to the command prompt & fdisk from there...

Sleipnir

ah yeah, if it's the original disk no problem there.

Capt'n Midnight

Make sure he can boot from the CD before he nukes the partition.

Best thing then is to boot to the dos prompt and format the drive
then

c:
md win98
cd win98
copy [cd driver letter]:\*.*

xcopy would be better but the idea is to have the core of the install files on the HDD and do the install from there - saves rooting for it later ..

NOTE:With Win95 this is essential cos that CD don't boot

tman

aharr mateys, that be what i always do cap'n midnight, except i do "sys a: c:" & then reboot without any disks in them thar drives.

i used to do xpcopy too, then i did a normal copy one day & realised you don't need any of the crap thats inside the subdir to install 98... always just used copy since then.

Cake Fiend

All you need is in the [CD drive]:\win98 directory. There's a vague convention to copy those files into a c:\windows\options\cabs directory, but it's not essential.

Capt'n Midnight

Don't copy the files into options/cabs sub folder of windows
- the oem install does not have setup.exe (+a few files) in the options folder (so no point in installing from here)
- if you deltree windows - you'd loose the cabs

If you leave them in a folder called c:\win98 it's fairly muppet proof.

Also get the usual utils - ERD / CFGBACK if possible can be useful..

tman

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
If you leave them in a folder called c:\win98 it's fairly muppet proof.

aye, and you don't have to change the installation dir from c:\windows.000. it the only way ***.

just got a call from my mate, managed to change the boot order in the bios without too much confusion, and apparently '98 setup gave him the option to remove the old partition.
should be smooth sailing.