Need help with a old Pentium POS

Sniper82

Lifer
Feb 6, 2000
16,517
0
76
Trying to put Win98SE on a old Pentium 200mhz. Well everything posts and it boots to CD-Rom. I choose startup Win98 from CD-Rom. Well after that it says drives not found? Also says Win98 setup files were not found?

What gives?

Its detecting the HDD and CD-Rom so what else could it be? Is there any other methods to putting Win98 on older PC's?
 

todpod

Golden Member
Nov 10, 2001
1,275
0
76
I had an old kg-2 i had to tell the floppy was atached even though it wasn't. It gave me this weird error about setup files if I remember correctly
 

piasabird

Lifer
Feb 6, 2002
17,168
60
91
Are you using the Win98 Boot Disk with CDROM Support?

It may give you some warning about running Scandisk.

You cant run that unless you have a driver loaded for Extended Memory support like Himem.sys or something like that. You can skip running Scandisk right after setting up a drive.
 

kornphlake

Golden Member
Dec 30, 2003
1,567
9
81
I never could get 98SE to boot from the CD. You'll have to get a boot floppy and a drive if you don't already have one, let it boot to the dos prompt then type install or setup or something like that to get it to start the install, after that everything should be straight forward enough. I'm not certain but it seems like a lot of those old motherboards didn't support boot from CD anyway, or if it did the bios was so whacked it didn't work properly.
 

Sniper82

Lifer
Feb 6, 2000
16,517
0
76
Ok the problem was that primary master IDE was disabled somehow. Clearing CMOS fixed it. Now I can get in and do all the stuff but now it locks up at "copying files needed for Windows Setup screen".

I hate old computers.
 

BillyBob313

Junior Member
Oct 31, 2004
7
0
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I did not think WIN98SE was bootable from CD like XP. You may wish to try running setup from from a floppy. On my rig XP boots from CD but only if the boot-up sequence is set to CD,A,C in the bios first. If I leave it as A,C,CD or any other sequence it will not boot the CD.

I still run an old rig with WIN98SE. The drives have to be set up as FAT 32 which means running FDISK and FORMAT from the start-up floppy before running setup.

 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
18,998
0
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Win 2k was the first bootable M$ OS CD. With Win 98SE, you have to partition and format your HD ahead of time and then install the OS to the formatted drive. If you don't have the Win98 boot diskette you can get equivalents like the Ultimate Boot Disk or ModBoot around the web. They can help you get Win 98 installed. You can also buy copies of the Official Win98 boot disk around the web.
.bh.

:moon:
 

Trente

Golden Member
Apr 19, 2003
1,750
0
0
When I used to install Win98 on my old machine at the time, I booted from the CD as well. so it does work...
 

Sniper82

Lifer
Feb 6, 2000
16,517
0
76
Ok I got it to work but for some reason the CD-Rom doesnt want to read anything while in Win98SE. I enabled DMA on the CD-Rom.