possible to install full win 98 over a network?

Fiveohhh

Diamond Member
Jan 18, 2002
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I have an old laptop I want to get win 98 on, I got it installed earlier and just upgraded, but now, its acting up and I want to do a clean install, it doesn't have a cd rom and I was wondering if theres a way to get it to boot to floppy with network support, and than do a full clean install?
Thanks
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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Is the system working well enough right now to connect to the network and transfer files? If so, it should be pretty easy to do without having to try to set up networking under DOS (which might be difficult, depends on if there are DOS drivers for the network controller on the laptop).

Put your Win98 CD into another computer that the laptop can see on the network. Then either share the CD drive on the network, or create a folder on the computer and share it, and copy the Win98 directory from the CD to that folder. On the laptop, open the shared folder or drive and copy the contents of the Win98 folder to a folder on the laptop in the root directory (c:\win98 is what I usually use).

Make a DOS/Windows boot disk. Reboot the laptop using the disk. Once you're at the command prompt, switch to the C drive, delete any directories you don't want, just be sure to leave the Win98 directory, and don't do a format of the disk. Assuming you have gotten ALL of your data files off the laptop already, you can just delete every folder but Win98, and all the files in the root directory (you may have some issues with read-only files; your boot disk should have attrib.exe on it so you can change the attributes). You could also copy all your data files to one folder and leave that along with the Win98 folder.

Once you're done with that, just go into the Win98 directory and run setup.exe.

If you need to format the partition, it'd be a bit more complicated, since you'd need to have a second partition on which to store the Win98 directory. You can use Partition Magic or a similar tool to do that (http://www.igd.fhg.de/~aschaefe/fips/ is a free tool).

If you prefer to use a network boot disk, find the DOS drivers for your laptop's network card, and then follow this, or here seems to be a very simply process.
 

Fiveohhh

Diamond Member
Jan 18, 2002
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Thanks I'm gonna give it a try, the thing is the HD isnt big enough to hold all the files, and I can't get on the network anymore anyway, gonna try to get to the network from dos, but not sure what other optiosn I have, might find a cdrom on ebay and hope for the best. Is there anyway to do it using tcp/ip? and lastly, is there away just to get the netowrk card drivers started when entering safe mode, i can go into safe mode fine, but have problems when booting normal.
Thanks
 

Lord Evermore

Diamond Member
Oct 10, 1999
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You've got a laptop with a hard drive too small to hold the Win98 install files, but you're going to install Win98 to it anyway? What kind of applications are you going to use that will be able to fit into the very small remaining space?

If "safe mode with networking" isn't an option in your boot menu, then you can't get networking in safe mode. I'm not really sure what causes that to be there in some cases but not in others.

I also just noticed that the second link above was the same as the first. Guess the "copy" keystroke didn't take. This is the right one.. That particular boot disk actually provides a way to use TCP/IP in DOS.

I'm not sure it will be possible to install Win98 over a network completely. The last time I installed it, I seem to remember it rebooting the machine once AFTER I'd begun Setup, and continuing to copy files. So it went, boot to floppy/CD, start setup, configure a couple things, reboot to Windows' own setup, continue copying files. Since the reboot will be done without accessing the boot floppy, it won't load any networking drivers, so it won't be able to access any mapped network drives to get the rest of the files. All of the needed files have to be stored locally in some way. Of course, it can't hurt to try it, especially if your system is already so badly hosed.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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There used to be a switch to give to SETUP.EXE to tell it that you were doing a network install. I would assume that it handles the reboot correctly then, and copies the needed files over the network before it becomes unavailable due to the reboot phases.