Computing Installing Windows 98 without the floppy disk

[emkee_reinvented]

Any one got knowledge on installing W 98 OG CD inc. OEM code.Start up disk lost in action. The Pc work s fine BIOS displays many options for boot A:/ but also ide/ sata and ATAPI gave also the USB option. Wont boot from the CD it seems to want the Floppy [hard-one] for the driver Format and Partitioning. Been a while rusty but its a worthy project. Trying to get into it. Worst of i don have the PC i am working on so kinda going on memory and report back on it


Assets a Floppy drive, PC that can facilitate , internet access and can make a USB lookalike. On paper. But any info to aid the proces helpful as when i go digital it seems to come down on endurance. This is about the OG floppy i am missing that came with the OS

https://dn710209.ca.archive.org/0/items/microsoft-windows-98-boot-disk-x-03-66930/Microsoft Windows 98 Boot Disk (X03-66930).jpg

 

[alasdairm]

first, the obvious question - if the pc is working fine with win 98 already installed, why do you need to install it? maybe you're just looking for a complete fresh install?

you should be able to download the .iso you need here: https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-98/98-second-edition

then you can get set up to install it from usb. lots of help available on this e.g.



or you can copy the entire contents of the WIN98 folder from your iso to a folder on your hard disk. then restart the machine in ms-dos mode and, navigate to the folder and run setup.exe.

alasdair

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

PCs in that era needed the floppy disk to access the files on the CD because the BIOS assumed a floppy drive would be in the system and booting directly from CD-ROM (and later USB) were very buggy for the first several years even up until the mid-2000s. So depending on the age of the hardware you might not have any way around using the floppy if you aren't willing to use another machine to get files on to the HDD. If the system is using PATA instead of SATA for mass storage that will probably be the case.

If your system is new enough and the BIOS isn't buggy there are some options. Here is a project that's doing exactly what you want: https://github.com/oerg866/win98-quickinstall

If that's not an option your best bet is probably grabbing a warez version of Windows 98 from somewhere and making your own boot floppy. The floppy is not tied to each copy of Windows if you're worried about it not functioning with whatever official Windows CD-ROM you're using. So you don't need to worry about it not functioning. The floppy just functions as a boot loader and has a few basic drivers on it along with some tools like fdisk for preparing the HDD before files for the OS are copied over from the CD-ROM.

If you have an MSDOS floppy disk on hand you can also manually install Windows to the HDD from DOS: http://www.winstall.com/win98/install98stepbystep1/indexfullpagethumbs.htm

Back in the day there were some universal boot floppy projects floating around so you didn't have to keep a disk around for each and every OS. But it has been a long time since I've had to use any of them so I can't remember their names or where to find them any more.

This is why I still keep a bunch of IDE floppy drives around and have a USB floppy drive for writing disks along with a stack of floppy disks that I paid way to much for from a local business back in the mid-2000s. When I was first going to college the school would not accept assignments on anything but floppy disks due to them being worried about security issues inherent to thumb drives. Only one local place still stocked floppies and they knew it. So they were charging $20+ for a couple of disks.

 

[HeadphonesandLSD]

I'm going to double post in an attempt to make my last post clearer and give you a better idea of how installation of the old pre-Win2k consumer OSs worked.

First, if your hardware has a properly coded BIOS you should be able to boot from the CD-ROM with no issue. Simply select CD-ROM drive as the first boot device in the BIOS and it should go right into the installation wizard. But like I said before most vendors were shipping buggy BIOS code well into the 2000s. So this regularly didn't work.

On most systems this meant you needed the floppy disk to kick start the process. Which is likely the problem you're having. In that case all legit copies of Windows back then shipped with a floppy disk to function as a universal loader. Which is what you're missing. These floppy disks were not special in any way and they were universal. They were not tied to each copy of the CD-ROM/OS. So you can grab one from any copy of Windows 98 and it'll work fine with the CD you have and the product code will work. The product codes are universal as well provided you have a legit one. There is no difference between the codes that came with keygens and the legit codes in other words. But I'm getting off track. My point is you don't have to worry about that. Even the floppy disk that came with Windows 95 would function fine for getting the install wizard on Windows 98 (or 98se, or ME and even 2k IIRC) going.

The floppy disk itself was just MSDOS and a collection of DOS drivers for stuff like accessing the CD-ROM and some basic drivers for things like input devices and graphics along with some branding.

In other words. Any copy of DOS from any vendor would work. Provided you had the drivers on the floppy to access the hardware. So you can use any flavor of DOS including things like FreeDOS to get the installation wizard on the CD going. You do not need the wizard on the CD-ROM at all either.

All the official book disk did was fire off a script that did the following:

1) Format the HDD (C: drive)
2) Create a folder on the HDD (named "Win98" IIRC)
3) Copy all the files from the CD-ROM over the to folder it created on the HDD
4) Reboot the machine

The official disk would tell you to remove the CD-ROM and floppy from the machine before rebooting so it would not be loaded again when the system rebooted. This ensured it would find the files you'd copied over to the HDD first. Which would fire up a basic script upon reboot which would continue the installation. In other words: The install wizard.

So all you have to do is get those files on to the HDD in the proper folder somehow to get that script to run. Which would handle all the heavy lifting like probing your hardware and finding the correct drivers for your machine along with launching the basic GUI which would prompt you to do stuff like setting up a name for the machine and other basic configuration. Once you finished going through those prompts the machine would reboot again and when it came back up you'd be dropped into the Windows 9x desktop. Which was just a basic shell sitting on top of MSDOS until they started switching home users over to the NT line of their OS starting with the Win2k release.

So with any basic copy of DOS on a floppy disk you can easily copy over the files from the CD-ROM using a few standard DOS commands. You only need three: fdisk to format the HDD to FAT32 (or FAT16 in older copies of Windows), mkdir+cd to create the folder and change directories into the newly created folder and finally xcopy to copy the files over from the CD-ROM to the HDD.

After that you simply reboot and either remove the CD-ROM+floppy from the machine or go into the BIOS to set the HDD as the first boot device. That will get you to the offical install script.

If you're lucky your vendor might have fixed the bug preventing CD-ROM/USB booting from working with a BIOS update. But you're going to need a floppy disk to update it so you'll have the same problem.

Hardware that came pre-installed with Windows typically suffered from those BIOS bugs more than stuff that was aimed at more technical users expected to build their own machines. Every computer I built starting from about 1997 didn't have any issues with booting from CD-ROM. But I was still stumbling upon pre-builts like Gateway and Dell systems up until the middle of the 2000s that had those typical BIOS bugs. The vendors weren't in any rush to fix them because every machine had a floppy in it anyway and they didn't expect their users to install/re-install their own OS. It was also helpful to discourage them from running non-Microsoft OSs to I guess. At any rate they never seemed to be any in hurry to fix them. So most people just kept a stack of floppies around back then like they keep a keychain of thumb drives today for that type of work.

I personally dislike the fact that machines no longer come with a floppy drive. Since no matter how bad things got when there was a floppy drive you could always be sure that you could get an OS booting to get in and snoop around to see what was going on. Instead of having to rely on thumb drives and PXE boot.

I didn't mention it before but you could also try PXE boot/netboot. But it's a whole can of worms that I don't want to get into right now and suffers from the same problem as all the other solutions that have been offered ITT so far. That is: It requires having another working machine/server to get started. Which is why the floppy drive was so great. You could work on machines without having another working machine around. Thumb drives are not the same. Since in addition to being troublesome thumb drives also come with several risks when you use them. You can never be sure if there isn't something bad on a thumb drive and they've caused many terrible security issues over the years. You can also easily fry a system with a usb thumb drive (or any usb device). Which is why all security sensitive machines have their usb ports either glued shut or otherwise disabled. Not that you're probably dealing with that issue on this little fun project of yours but it's important to keep in mind in general.

Floppy disks might have been slow and didn't offer much space. But it was all the space you needed to get a basic OS up and running and you could be sure that once you had a working disk it would continue working and no one was probably going to sneak anything bad on to it. That said, you could do some harmful and fun stuff with them to. Like the old matchhead bomb trick.

Anyway, if you're going to play around with "retro" OSs like these I would suggest that you invest in a usb floppy drive and buy some floppy disks off ebay. You should be able to get all the disks you need along with a usb floppy drive itself for about $20-$30. Spending that money is much less of a headache than attempting to work around these bugs on each and every old machine you come into contact with. It'll give you the ability to write disks to work with all systems going back to the 1980s. Which is going to be the bulk of stuff you'll probably come into contact with. There are also some cheap options out there to get a modern thumb drive functioning as a floppy disk on old PATA machines if you want to go that route. But I find it more of a pain in the ass compared to simply using the floppy drive that's probably already in the machine.

With Windows before Win2k it's all just DOS all the way back. Everything from Windows 1.x-ME is just MSDOS with a fancy GUI on top. DOS expects and was built around booting off floppy disks. So you best get familiar with using them. Even the NT OSs of the 90s-mid 2000s expect the user to have DOS laying around for a lot of administrator tasks. You'll want and need a way to boot DOS from a floppy when dealing with these old OSs. Whenever you get the dreded BSOD it's going to be the first thing you'll be reaching for. Back in the day we didn't stick in a thumb drive or CD-ROM and boot an entire modern OS from livecd. We booted our little 1MB DOS enviroments and debugged from there.

 

[emkee_reinvented]

first, the obvious question - if the pc is working fine with win 98 already installed, why do you need to install it? maybe you're just looking for a complete fresh install?

-Gonna get some blank Floppy s today and report back.

Long version: the PC is a Pentium 4HT. where does that put it on the timeline of ? Sounds as it doesnt have a ¨properly coded BIOS" the apperatus is over at my son. So cant check or test anything. It has an old Ubuntu/ linux distro that runs. We could hook it on internet. Does it see USB or the Floppy drive ? [gonna check ]

Boot sees
-the floppy drive A:/
-ATAPI that refers to the DVD/ CD right. Explaining 'driver not found'
when we tried to boot it from CD directly ?
-IDE/SATA the HDD does that imply the Motherboard is fit for both types ?
-And also USB.

It s a nice old skool PC. One of the reason he was interested. along the DVD and Floppy drives. Nice motherboard thrift shop item that was once thon the desk of a hig post of Social Welfare office. Has several open sloths old as well new but from teh more expensive range.

You want that Floppy for 'in case of in emergence' Trying to digest this during writing also @HeadphonesandLSD a.o . seems the needed files are on the site you linked to @alasdairm and we have to find a way to put them on a floppy.

So what seems the best move get some blank Floppy s and go from there. And he be playing DOOM on it and de-fragging, maybe overclock it. After he installed the separate provided FAN s that i had to take out one of my other PC s.

 

[alasdairm]

seems the needed files are on the site you linked to @alasdairm and we have to find a way to put them on a floppy.

not necessarily.

is the machine connected to the internet? if so, download the .iso then either mount it or unpack the files to the hard disk.

to mount it as a drive, you can use a tool like daemon tools 3.47 or alcohol 120%/52%. for the latter, you'll need to find an older version as newer versions do not support win 98.

to simply unpack the files to your hard disk, you can use an older (e.g. 9.22) version of 7-zip.

alasdair