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Installing Windows 98SE on a 770X Thinkpad

NeXT

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Joined
Oct 22, 2008
Messages
8,096
Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I got this thing (with 128mb ram and a wiped 10gb hard drive) and after deciding over installing wither 95, 98, NT 4 or 2000 I decided on 98 because of the age of the system and 98SE is pretty much the last decent OS that still kinda sorta ran on top of DOS.

So I pop my 98SE disc in, disc spins up, I'm prompted to boot from either the CD drive or hard drive, I select the CD drive, I get a blinking cursor and the cd drive spins down and I can go no further.

Okay, what's up? I can't Floppy boot the installer (like I normally did in the past because the systems were too damn old to boot from a CD drive) because the floppy drive and the cd drive share the same PowerBay and I have no external floppy drive.
 
From what i know, a standard Win 98SE disc is not bootable. there IS a workaround for it that i know of, and that is to install MS-DOS and the MSCDEX drivers and then install 98SE from DOS.
 
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I find that strange as this disc IS bootable from the cd. I popped it into my thinkpad 380D and i's allowing me to fire up the installer and if that means nothing, the fact that I was prompted int eh first place if wanted to either boot from the cd or hard drive means it started booting off the CD but then stopped for some reason.
 
Well, since it's a bootable CD it should work. Have you tried any other bootable CDs in that machine, make sure it's not something simple like the CD drive going flaky?
 
I would make a bootable 98se boot disk and make sure it has format.exe on it. Boot from floppy and fdisk the HD, reboot and format with FAT32, then reboot and install from the CDROM.

Most likely the wiped drive is NTFS formatted and win98 has no idea what to do with it and crashes (the 1st thing the installer will try is to look for and read the HD). Could also be a bad HD, go to seagate and download the IDE version of seatools (free) and burn that to a CD. It should boot and allow you to test the HD to make sure nothing major is wrong with the drive before you waste too much time.

Your machines recognises the cdrom and boots from it so the disk and cdrom drive are fine.
 
I do it in that way

  • booting dos with cd drivers
  • format c:
  • cd d:\tools\oldmsdos\
  • copy xcopy3*.* c: /v
  • goto drive c
  • xcopy32 D:\win98 c:\win98cd /s/e/v
  • goto c:\win98cd
  • start setup

I assume that your harddisk is drive c and your cd is drive d. This worked for years and you will never need to insert your windows cd. :)
 
Fdisk is reporting no partitions on the drive at all.
Also, I fed it my bootable NT 4 and 2000 discs and the system ignores them and does not bother to try booting from them. Something must be up with the cd drive.
 
Fdisk is reporting no partitions on the drive at all.
Also, I fed it my bootable NT 4 and 2000 discs and the system ignores them and does not bother to try booting from them. Something must be up with the cd drive.

Did you try making a partition using fdisk?
 
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