Need help installing win98se on OLD pentium 100 laptop with blank hard drive! Won't recognize cd drive!

[mellondust]

I recently aquired for free an old twinhead Slimnote8100TV. It is a pentium 100 with 32megs of ram. This is an old computer where you have to switch the floppy drive and the cd drive back and forth. The problem is when I go to install win98, the boot disk can't recognize a cd drive to copy the files from. Well yeah, thats becuase it is sitting on my lap! In the bios you can only boot from a or c drives, there is no option for a cd drive. Puting in the cd drive only gives me an error. Help! How can I get the cd drive to work or at least boot from it? The wopping 384meg hard drive is completly void of an operating system but I would like to get it working to play some old school games on the road.

 

[magomago]

will 384 megabytes of a hd even be enough to instal win98se? Isn't the minimal install something around that?


Why don't you try a win98 bootdisk....boot up with the floppy and from there then swap to the CDrom IF you can

The other option would be to try to get win98 installed somehow on a different computer using the same HDD and then swap it in and hope that it'll detect the new mobo (or old shall we say )

 

[tk149]

If I read your post correctly, then you have already tried setting the BIOS to boot from "A" drive, while sticking in the CDROM? If not, try that.

You might also want to check out the manufacturer's website for help.

You could also use laplink, or if you have an old DOS 6.0 (or higher) disk around, Interlink with a null-modem cable to copy the Win98 install files from the CD to the Hard drive using a second computer. It'll take a long time though.

 

[dkozloski]

Install DOS from floppies including CD-ROM drivers then do an upgrade and install the new system over DOS. Also my laptop has a cable to plug the floppy drive into the parallel port and have the CD-ROM drive in the drive bay. This is required because some laptops will only boot to the rebuild CD that came with the thing new because the BIOS is proprietary.

 

[WarCon]

If you don't have DOS the Win98 boot disk can be copied to C: and then you have to edit the autoexec.bat I believe all you have to do in there is change a path command from a: to c: and then edit setramd.bat and change an a: to a c: on a command. I am sure you can figure it out though.

 

[dbwillis]

Put the 384mb drive into another PC, format it (Fat32) and then copy the Win98 folder off the CD onto the drive.....put it back into the old PC and boot to the floppy into DOS..then run the install from the Win98 folder on the C drive...once your all set, you can delete the Win98 folder and get some space back...

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
Install DOS from floppies including CD-ROM drivers then do an upgrade and install the new system over DOS. Also my laptop has a cable to plug the floppy drive into the parallel port and have the CD-ROM drive in the drive bay. This is required because some laptops will only boot to the rebuild CD that came with the thing new because the BIOS is proprietary.

You don't even need to install DOS, you just need to take a DOS boot disk (from bootdisk.com for example) that includes CD drivers, go
format c: /s
then copy the disk contents to the hard drive (copy *.* c: and say N to copying over command.com)

But as implied above, you'll need to do a custom install and say no to just about everything to fit 98 in just 384 MB.

 

[redbeard1]

Check my post out over at tech support. This should work for you if you can work from a dos prompt.

Thread