Re: Formatting Question

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LVTravel wrote:

Funny but I have never had a Win 98 CD boot a computer yet.
They all came with a System Boot Floppy that loaded the
CD-ROM drivers into DOS as most computers back when 98 came
out couldn't boot from a CD, only a hard drive or floppy. I
haven't seen a Win 98 CD, including the latest Win 98 SE
version with IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM, which are
the system files in DOS, in the root of the CD. The only
files present in the Root of the CD are: SETUP.EXE,
AUTORUN.INF and README.TXT and none of these files will
operate without the operating system being installed, in
this case DOS. (Even Windows NT, which was the professional
OS then, had boot floppies to enable the OS to be installed
since the CD couldn't be booted.)

Malke's instructions are 100% correct. When I was
rebuilding computers for my organization (school with more
than 100 computers) I always created the proper partition
with FDISK and then formatted the hard drive with FORMAT
which were on the System Boot Disk. I then copied the Win98
folder on the CD to the hard drive and installed from the
hard drive. Actually made the install faster and if I
needed any later files for upgrading the system, they were
on the hard drive and I didn't have to hunt for the CD.

Thanks for confirming my aged memory of this. It has, after all, been rather
a longish time since I installed Win98. I think I created a vm running
Win98 a couple of years ago, but my own Win98 boxen have been in Silicon
Heaven for a long time now. Goodness knows I installed Win98 enough times
so the procedure is still pretty automatic! You and I had exactly the same
technique.

I was so glad when I could move to Win2k for my own stuff although I kept
Win98 on a few boxen so the kids could play their games. Win2k was a really
useful OS. As for ME, we shall not speak of this again. ;-)

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
Don't Panic!
.

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