Is what I'm trying to do even possible?

CRTFanatic

CRTFanatic

New Member
Hello all, first post here, and wouldn't you believe it, I had no idea where to put this thread, but I figure here is pretty good.

Anyway, I'd rather not bore you with a long and complicated story, so I' try to keep it brief.

Long ago, I had a no name PC that ran Windows 98. Used it until I got an HP with XP, and I tore it up for parts.

Since then, I've been using Mac OS X more often, and as a result, my HP hardly gets used. Recently, I have felt the urge to use 98 again, and I figured I could try it in my HP.

Now, I wasn't even sure if this was possible (I'm still not sure) but I decided to give it a go anyway.

I took out the hard drive that had XP on it, and put in the one that has 98 on it, and tried to boot. Well, it said it needed a boot disk. Alright, so I got one from bootdisk.com, and when I restarted using the disk this time, it said "Starting Windows 98", Then it asked if I wanted to boot with CD-ROm support or with out. I choose with, and it appeared to be recognizing my hardware and all that, and proceeded to the " Preparing to start your computer, please wait this may take a few minutes" screen (Not exact dialogue ^^)

Then it says "Data error reading from drive A Retry, Abort, Ignore, Fail?" Well, my only real option from there is "Ignore", so I chose that option. It said "The diagnostic tools were successfully loaded to drive D" (I don't know what drive that is.)

Then, "File not found". And in the next line down "To get help, type HELP and press ENTER."

At this point it gives me an "A:\" prompt, and I don't know what to do, because if I type "HELP" it just gives me "Bad command or file name". As you can tell, I'm not very literate with DOS, I was just two years old when Windows 95 came out.:o


OK, yeah, that was longer then I wanted it to be, but I also wanted to be completely thorough and not leave anything out.

So, can anyone help me or give me advice on what to do? Anything helpful is appreciated. Thank you!


EDIT: Oh, and to be clear, I do not have the original restore disks. I'm not even sure if the original computer came with any.
 
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OK, so I tried using a different floppy disk for the boot disk, and I no longer get the "Error reading drive A" So it must have been the disk I was using.

But, it still gives me the "Diagnostics were loaded to drive D" and then it gives me an "A:\" prompt again.

Please can anyone help me? I have no idea what I'm supposed to do from here. :( Any advice you can offer is appreciated!
 
You're trying to put a HDD that already had Windows 98 on it, into a newer computer? If the computer is even a few years old, none of the hardware will be supported by Windows 98, which is probably why you are getting all the errors. Idk for sure though.
 
If I were you, I would buy the same computer you had that you sold the parts for, you can probably get it used somewhere, for like $50.
 
tknick90 said:
You're trying to put a HDD that already had Windows 98 on it, into a newer computer? If the computer is even a few years old, none of the hardware will be supported by Windows 98, which is probably why you are getting all the errors. Idk for sure though.
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You're probably right, I didn't think a lot of the hardware would be supported. But the thing is, it seems to be recognizing all of it. It shows the manufacturers of all of my hardware, and it doesn't seem to be showing and errors.
Sir Travis D[QUOTE said:
If I were you, I would buy the same computer you had that you sold the parts for, you can probably get it used somewhere, for like $50.
Click to expand...
That's probably the option I'm going to have to take, but I was just trying to see if there was any way I could do it like this.
 
OK, I did some scouring of the internet, and I stumbled upon a post on a help forum from 8 years ago, that said this:

"you need to boot up with a startup disk floppy and tranfer system files at the a: prompt of the start up floppy type sys c: it will take a few minutes then it will say system transfered remove floppy and disk should boot"

So I did the "sys C:" thing, and it did say "System transferred."

So I rebooted, and instead of the normal "Invalid system disk", I see the Windows 98 splash screen for just an instant, then it returns to the previous screen that says "Microsoft Windows 98" (In the usual DOS lettering) with a "C:\" prompt. Can anyone help me from here? Thank you!

EDIT: Not sure if this is important or not, but just on a lark, I repeatedly pressed F5 just before boot up to see if it would go into safe mode. It didn't it did that exact same thing. BUT this time, right before the C:\ prompt, it said "Windows is bypassing startup files..." Does this mean anything?
 
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change directories into the 98 cd

Code: 
cd D:\win98

Then type setup after that and let it go.

Windows 98 is slow, only supports FAT file systems, has crap driver support and runs like crap in general.

Why not just make a virtual machine of windows 98 and not even bother wasting time loading it on an actual system?
 
Wouldn't I actually need the Windows 98 CD to do that? I'm not trying to install Windows or anything, it should already be bootable from the hard drive, but it isn't booting.

And why am I doing this? Out of boredom mostly, but also because I'd like to have a change for a little while. I already confirmed that the hard drive that has XP on it boots just fine when I switch them out, so if this goes wrong somehow, no harm down really, just go back to XP.
 
Well, you would be better off installing and learning Linux than going back to 98. If you are bored why not learn Linux? At least that is an actual skill that can carry on to a job or a career. No one in hell still uses Windows 98, and its not like you can do much in it.
 
I have a somewhat older notebook that runs Ubuntu 8.04, I know Linux pretty well.

I like to try different things on my computers, What can I say? This particular PC has also run DSL at one time, as well as Vista. Now I want to try 98, is there anything wrong with wanting to see if I can do it?
 
CRTFanatic said:
I have a somewhat older notebook that runs Ubuntu 8.04, I know Linux pretty well.

I like to try different things on my computers, What can I say? This particular PC has also run DSL at one time, as well as Vista. Now I want to try 98, is there anything wrong with wanting to see if I can do it?
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No, nothing wrong. A waste of time in some people's minds perhaps but there is definitely nothing wrong with it.

If your 98 installation had the CABs copied over, you can run setup from with in the cabinet files itself. It is an old trick a lot of IT guys did back in the day to do over installs of windows off the hard drive instead of off the CD.

If the C:\Windows\Options\Cabs directory is present, switch to it then type setup and watch it install.
 
Thanks for the advice, but I still get "Bad command or file name" when I type that in. (I don't know DOS very well, I assume all one would need to do is type in that command line and it *should* work?)
 
One thing I remember; the primary reason I bought this current PC to replace the old one was because I was having some problems with Norton Anti-Virus, I deleted most everything I could off of it but it still had some problems with it, I assume because of the files it would not let me delete. Could this be affecting anything now?
 
Well, it must have been a bad hard drive or something, because I remembered I had another hard drive with 98 on it, switched them out, it booted right up. :rollseyes:

Thanks for all the help!
 
you you cd into C:\Windows\Options\cabs and do a dir and if there are files listed then you should be able to run setup.
 
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