Win98SE image on External Drive

beer enigma

Ok, here's the problem....

I have an old laptop running win95 but without a CD drive. I want to upgrade to 98SE to allow me to use a wireless adapter with it, but without a CDR face a problem.

I have a licenced copy of 98SE that I dont use any more, but wondered if it is possible to somehow 'image' this onto an external usb hard drive to do the install that way ??

tman

you could just copy the win98 folder to your c: drive, boot from a dos boot disk and then run c:\win98\setup.exe
i'm too hungover to go into any depth on this though...

SouperComputer

98 is pretty flexible hardware wise. Try this.

Ghost the original (source)98 installation onto the target drive
Boot windows from the target drive, in the source computer remove the original to be sure!
Remove any old software that is specific to the old machine, drivers being a prime example. Do a bit of a cleanup too if needs be
Pop the target drive in the target machine.
Boot to safe mode (you dont have to do this, but it seems to helps things along)
Reboot
Follow the onscreen prompts for the "new hardware", rebooting as neccasry with the exception of PCMCIA, ignore the prompt, do not reboot after those.
Install drivers as needed.
Enjoy

kaizersoze

Unless I'm reading the OP wrong, he only has Win98 on cd and has no cd drive on the laptop. Was Win98 available on a set of floppys aswell as cd?
The idea of ghosting onto an external usb drive probably won't work as 95 didn't support usb.

MunsterCycling

Revision B of 95 supported USB 1.1 otherwise I must of been dreaming all the times I used usb devices with it.

beer enigma

kaizersoze wrote:

Unless I'm reading the OP wrong, he only has Win98 on cd and has no cd drive on the laptop. Was Win98 available on a set of floppys aswell as cd?
The idea of ghosting onto an external usb drive probably won't work as 95 didn't support usb.

I have another PC with a CD drive that I can use to port the image onto the external drive....tried this earlier today, but the machine running 95 doesn't seem to recognise the external drive. Maybe I should just give up

Capt'n Midnight

MunsterCycling wrote:

Revision B of 95 supported USB 1.1 otherwise I must of been dreaming all the times I used usb devices with it.

but only if you also have win95 device drivers for it too

you could use a laplink cable or interlnk from dos 6 to copy the files across very slowly from another PC - does the laptop have infrared ?

there is a boot floppy with drivers FreeDos ? for usb memory sticks, even a 16MB one would need only need a few trips


http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm - have a look at method 4 perhaps

you don't need ghost for 98 ( you need a license for every machine that benefits from a ghost image ) swap drives to a new pc and "Found new Hardware" keeps popping up - move it between all the types of machines on your network and load all the drivers and you have an image that restore a failed 98 pc

osmethod

Does the Laptop and your other PC have network cards?
Your other choices are as Captain Midnight eluded to.

You may need to check which version of 95 your using. OSR2 (IIRC) had an additional setup file that needed to be run to get USB working. Worth a look?

osmethod

uch

Does the Laptop have a PCMCIA slot ?
If so get a PCMCIA CD plug in copy files to HDD and away you go.

Capt'n Midnight

uch wrote:

Does the Laptop have a PCMCIA slot ?
If so get a PCMCIA CD plug in copy files to HDD and away you go.

YOu could try to borrow a compact flash card and a pcmcia convertor for it ?

TerrorFirmer

MunsterCycling wrote:

Revision B of 95 supported USB 1.1 otherwise I must of been dreaming all the times I used usb devices with it.

"What was your dream about last night?"

"Em....usb 1.1 support in Win95...em...you?"

Actually, does anyone know when Win95 ceased to be supported, like the way Win98 updates are only being stopped now?

Does anyone here still use Win95/98 on a regular basis?

I have to get a few old computers up and running soon, am going to be installing either Win NT or 98 for OS to make the most of low ram, can imagine its going to drive me insane though with having to install all the drivers manually for each device...(as opposed to win2k automatically detecting and installing hardware)