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Question

Trying to install windows 98 onto a partition on my laptop.

Nov 24, 2012 4:36AM PST

Hello, I am trying to install Windows 98 SE onto a partition on my laptop hard drive. I have formatted this partition to be FAT32 and gave the partition an appropriate size. When trying to start the setup, it tells me it can't recognize my cdrom, no drivers detected. What can I do, to fix this? I know, when using virtualbox it recognizes it perfectly fine.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Sorry but for Win98 it uses the old DOS drivers.
Nov 24, 2012 7:00AM PST

You edit config.sys and autoexec.bat to load the DOS driver and MSCDEX.exe.

Be aware I can't know which driver you need for this laptop. Your laptop maker might.
Bob

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Follow up
Nov 24, 2012 8:05AM PST

Hi, so I only need the cdrom driver for DOS. And those files you mentioned, are they on the boot cd or boot floppy?

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Sorry you are going back to very old stuff.
Nov 24, 2012 8:46AM PST

If you are very lucky you can boot your Windows 98 CD and side step the need to edit the files.

Sorry but it's sort of old knowledge about editing those files to add CD support. Apple made fun with a commercial about that years ago and well, all skill levels arrive here. I don't want to upset those that are experts or new. But this is an old thing and the driver can depend on the interface, make, model and gets even weirder if you have one of the old common for Windows 95/98 days SB Blaster with the Mitsubishi proprietary interface. And it gets downright bizarre if connected with SCSI.

This area is not supportable today as folk often don't know what they have.
Bob

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Where do I go from here?
Nov 25, 2012 12:42AM PST

Thanks for the reply. I was trying to get a live demo going for a presentation tomorrow on my laptop. I tried only using the boot disk and again it can't find the driver for the cdrom. Is there anything I can do? Like download and install the driver and it will magically work? Lol. I doubt that, but if VirtualBox can do it, why can't I. Microsoft makes the driver for the cdrom on this computer. It shouldn't be too hard to see if they offer their old drivers right?

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Sorry no. MSFT does not write or supply the driver.
Nov 25, 2012 1:17AM PST

You are going way back in time here.

Look, it's a demo. Do this the old fashioned EASY way and copy the Win98 folder over to the HDD C: drive of same from the CD. Now with that copied over you can boot to dos, cd win98 and run setup.

We did that when we could not find the CD driver.

-> Remember that after all these posts I don't see machine, drive and interface details so I can't guess if I know where the driver is today.

But we can setup Win98 without that.
Bob

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That should be easy enough
Nov 25, 2012 2:58AM PST

So I copy the win98 folder from the cd to the root of the partition on my hard drive. Then reboot the computer in DOS mode (Not sure exactly how since I'm running WIndows 7). Could I use the command prompt instead? Then run the setup that way.

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Yes. Folk in the service group
Nov 25, 2012 10:29AM PST

Did this so many times it's not funny.

-> What's this about Windows 7? To boot DOS means a MBR and will blow up 7 as the install writes that. This sounds bad to me. This many posts and sorry if I missed where this was running 7.
Bob

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Windows 7
Nov 25, 2012 10:54AM PST

Yes I want to dual boot Windows 7 and Windows 98.

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It's unsupported.
Nov 25, 2012 11:43PM PST

Besides "No. The memory requirements for Windows 7 far exceed the maximum memory Windows 98 can run in (about 768MB). Also, there are no Windows 98 drivers for the devices on a motherboard that can run Windows 7."

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=dual+boot+98+and+windows+7 finds prior discussions and I see nothing new to solve this.

HOWEVER if you are lucky enough to have a machine you can reduce RAM to about 512MB and can select which drive to boot from it might be possible. But I can't hold hands on that.
Bob