Old hardware (1995-2000) optical boot

[lakedude]

I've become curious about the old hardware I worked on back in the day. Hopefully someone still has these things laying around or perhaps a they have better memory than I have.

What I remember:

A Win98SE startup floppy was like gold in large part because it contained drivers you needed (or did you?) to access the optical drive. If you needed to load a replacement hard drive the Win98SE startup disk was your best friend. Seems like a Win95 disk wasn't nearly as slick.

The question is this:

Was that just a Windows thing? Would a bootable Linux CD/DVD have booted alone without the need to pre-boot with a floppy? Would the BIOS absolutely not boot from an optical without the type of drivers present on the old Win98SE startup disk?

I'm asking because like many people I started out on Windows (well actually VMS and DOS) and now I'm curious if all that fussing around was a hardware limitation or just the way Windows made you do it.

 

[WilliamM2]

I never used a floppy with Win98. The CD's booted fine all by themselves.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

You could boot from a CD back then, but it wasn't every Win98 CD that was bootable. (Only some of them, probably the later ones.) I never had a Win95 CD that was bootable.

Normal process was booting from floppy and installing from CD.

A bootable Linux CD that was actually able to run on 20-year-old hardware would boot fine.

 

[bbhaag]

It was a BIOS issue not a Windows issue.

 

[lakedude]

from: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/221829

How to Install Windows 98

After you partition and format your hard disk, you can install Windows 98:
Insert the Windows 98 Startup disk in the floppy disk drive, and then restart your computer.
When the Windows 98 Startup menu is displayed, choose the Start computer with CD-ROM support option, and then press ENTER.

This is just the way I remember it. Clearly when this was written Win98 disks were not bootable.

 

[bigboxes]

I was in graduate school back in 1999. I remember buying a student version of Win98SE for like $5. It was only for the upgrade version. One had only to make a start up disk from a working machine and you could use that to boot to the Win98SE disc and install a full copy. I thought I was so slick. There's some nostalgia for the OS, but while my computer rocked the OS did not.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

It was a BIOS issue not a Windows issue.

Yup. My old Epox MVP3-G2 had exactly three boot options, A:, C: (MBR of the first IDE drive installed) and SCSI. The last was for booting from a 3rd party IDE/SCSI controller card, if I remember correctly.

That was pretty common configuration back then.

 

[sm625]

I used the win98 startup disk a lot, even well into the XP era. I mainly used it for the fdisk tool.