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Can I install win98 without a boot disk?

H

Heraclitus

Member
The computer is a Dell laptop that has one modular bay for either a floppy drive OR a cd-rom at any one time. Currently its harddrive is clean and formatted.

My first impulse was simply to copy all of the files from the boot disk to the HDD, and then set the computer to boot from the HDD. But it kept asking for the A drive. So I went into the autoexec and config.sys and edited all the references to A, replacing them with C. Still no love, though. At least part of the problem comes from the weird Ramdisk thing the boot disk sets up, which changes the drive letters in bizarre fashion (I'm sorry if this last bit is cryptic; I can explain it better if anyone thinks it's relevant).

Can anybody tell me simply how to install Windows? Thanks in advance for any helpful reply.
 
Only SE is bootable from CD. 98 in not bootable from CD. Try to burning the Win98 files to a cdr and make it bootable.

Rain
 
I have Win98SE. I tried setting the BIOS to boot from the cd-rom, but was greeted with an error message after POST telling me that the drive was not bootable.

Rain, can you be a bit more specific about what I should burn? The problem is that I don't know what files I need to start the Windows setup.
 
Well what I recomended wont work since your cant get the cdrom drive to boot. Have you tried a network install.

Rain
 
The latest Nero does it:

Bootable CDs may be created only under Windows 95/98or NT.

1. First step is to create a new bootable ISO compilation. This can be done by clicking the menu command ?File" -> ?New...".
2. On the left side of the dialog please choose the icon ?CD-ROM (Boot)".
3. At this point you can see the property page ?Boot". The upper part of this page is used to select the kind of model you have as input for the bootable CD. You can choose whether you want to use a logical drive or an image file as model for your bootable CD.

Note: If the desired input device does not appear in the list of possible model drives then the reason is probably the size limitation for bootable CDs. The logical drive's size may not exceed the capacity of a CD; that means 640MB.
Note: Please consider that you need to have administrator rights to be able to create bootable CDs using Windows NT 4.0. This behaviour is by Microsoft's operating system design and was chosen to prevent hackers from accessing other user's (possibly secret) files. But to create bootable CDs all sectors of a logical drive must be accessible. And the only user who's got the permission to read all sectors using Windows NT is the supervisor.

4. The lower part of the boot property page contains detailed settings for bootable CDs. These settings normally are dimmed indicating that Nero will check and set all the expert options automatically for you. If you choose to use an image file as model for the creation of a bootable CD, then Nero can't automatically choose those settings for you. In this case, or if you choose to define these settings manually, you can do so. Of course you're responsible for the resulting CD. If the settings are incorrect you will get an incorrect bootable CD...

5. You can now click on New. The ISO compilation window opens.
6. If the File Browser has not yet been opened, you can do that now by entering the VIEW>New File Browser command or by clicking on the File Browser icon.
7. Click on the desired data files in the File Browser with the mouse and then drag them into the compilation window.

Note: you can burn a bootable CD without data on it. In that case, you don't have to compile files.

8. Now open the Write CD dialog. The easiest way to do this is to click on the Write CD icon in the toolbar. You will then go to the Write CD dialog box, which will undoubtedly look familiar to you:
9. It is the same box which you saw for the creation of a new compilation, only now the Burn property sheet is shown on the top.

You will see several boxes, of which some have already been selected. All of the preferences may now be examined and changed if necessary.

10. Confirm by clicking on Write.
 
Okay, I made the bootable cdrom. Popped it in, set the BIOS to boot from cd, and it boots no problem. Asks me if I'd like to start the computer with CD support. I say yes, it loads the devices, and delivers me to a command prompt. I can see my harddrive (C: ), the Windows installation RAMDisk (D: ) and my CD (E: ) no problem. But if I try to execute E:\setup.exe (or E:\win98\setup.exe) it tells me "This program requires Microsoft Windows".

What now?
 
Actually, to be more specific:

It says "Preparing to start your computer. This may take a few minutes. Please wait..."

"The diagnostic tools were successfully loaded to drive D."

Then it runs mscdex: "Drive E: = Driver MSCD001 unit 0"

"To get help, type HELP and press ENTER"

Then it gives me the A: prompt, even though, as noted, I have no A drive.
 
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