Re: how can i install win98se on this old laptop?

From: Stefan Patric (tootek2_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 01/31/04 

Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 17:56:28 -0800

On Friday 30 January 2004 07:52, hugh jass wrote:

> I used to run win98 on it and then got sick of it...
> Then I tried to install Gentoo linux on it and didn't quite succeed,
> so it's been sitting idle for a while.
> Now I urgently need to put win98 on it again so I can take it on a
> trip... When I insert the win98SE CD and boot up, all I get is a
> cursor (looks like an underscore).
> I've only installed windows from DOS or older versions.
> How can I:
> 1. remove any linux stuff that's on there now (would like to format c:
> if I could)
> 2. install win98 on an empty machine.
>
> Thanks for your help,
> hj
>
> By the way, the laptop is an Asus P2-266mhz with 64Mb ram.

Today, believe it or not, I just installed W98SE on an old Toshiba
Satellite Pro 430CDT P1 -- don't know the speed -- with 48MB for a
friend. It didn't have Linux on it, but it did have a thoroughly
trashed version of W98 (wouldn't boot), which needed to be wiped clean.
So, the procedure should be the same.

Like yours, the machine wouldn't boot to a real prompt. It wouldn't
boot off the CD-ROM drive either. Drivers corrupted. The only thing
it would boot off of by default was the floppy drive. I used another
W98SE machine to make a Startup Floppy Disk, that would include among
other things a generic CD-ROM driver. There is a batch file --
bootdisk.bat -- in the C:\WINDOWS\COMMAND directory that you run to
create it. It is recommend that you shutdown Windows and reboot to DOS
mode to run the batch file. CD (change directory) to the aforementioned
directory before running the file.

Booting off the newly created Startup Floppy gets you to an A:\ prompt.
Run fdisk on C:, and delete all the Linux partitions, then create your
Windows partition(s). No need to format. The Windows install should
take care of that. Put your W98SE Install CD in the CD-ROM drive and
run the Windows setup executable. Probably D:\setup.exe.

That's it. My install took about 40 minutes. Recognized all the
hardware. No glitches at all. I was surprised. 

-- 
Stefan Patric
NoLife Polymath Group
tootek2@yahoo.com

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