re: Where is W98's DOS-Level Setup option?
Saturday, August 28, 2004 at 7:39 pm
Windows 98 Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Kiwi
(2111 messages posted)
To allow a long story to end up having to be told anyway, it's a new PC, with one
new, and one old, hard drive, both Maxtors, and a LiteOn Combo Optical. I've just
put it together, with an AMD XP 2800 cpu, Abit NF7 MB, 350 watt PSU, Aeroflow HSF,
in a Kingwin 424 enclosure.
In the past, on similar builds, I've copied the \Win98 folder from the CD into a
C:\Cabs folder on the Hdd, and run my install from there, very fast, and even with
some kind of INF file sometimes that feeds the install all of the right stuff, like
the codes, when needed. That much was running reasonably normally last evening when
it went "Splat"!
Winsetup itself was unable to complete the part where it copies files to a TEMP folder
preparatory to extracting them. It committed a fatal exception error. It seemed
at first like it wasn't a "hard" crash, and tried to recover; but a second and a
third BSOD event finally killed it for good and all.
Two more attempts to use the \Cabs folder copies ended up failing at a much earlier
point in the process, but still creating those fatal exception "Blue Screens". That's
was this afternoon. So I tried to use the actual CD, the old & slow way. No such
luck. I have a First Edition W98 original floppy, and it fails with this message:
"Scanning PCI Bus with Mechanism #2" -- and it's locked solid, no Ctrl-Alt-Del gets
through.
Last night, I made a brand new Emergency Boot Disk when the Setup suggested it.
I have some spares of that one already somewhere, but decided what the heck. That
floppy has the same CD Driver as the First Edition Floppy. It does the same thing,
gets lost in Mechanism #2. From there, I went online and dopwnloaded an image file
from www.bootdisk.com, ran that and made a new W98 boot disk.
With it, I can reach the command line. But Setup tells me it doesn't want to work
the way I remember it being able to. I've looked inside the startup files of all
three floppies, there's no difference other than the CD drivers. It was at that
point, late this afternoon, or early this evening, that I asked my question.
>
>when you started the computer with the boot disk did it give the option to start
>with cd support?
Yes
>
>if you do get cd support, at the a drive type the letter for the cd drive.
It becomes "R" with the bootdisk.com setup, and I used DOS' Dir all over the doggone
thing, finding only two instances of Setup.Exe
>it won't be d, it will be something else as the ram drive takes up a letter.
My systems generally push the optical drives out to about letters h, i, j, k, etc.
with two physical drives and a total of 6 to 8 partitions, since I do backups from
one physical drive to the other.
>
>have you formatted the drive if you want to do a clean install? you'll need your
>drivers, your reg. number, and a windows 98 cd since this is an upgrade.
>
The drivers were copied to folders on the hard drive while that drive was a tertiary
drive in another computer here, which is also when/where the Formatting and Partitioning
was performed.
>
There is something I have overlooked; I know there has to be. I've done just about
this same thing two or three times in the past (I don't build/ rebuild PC's more
than once in 2-3 years). If Dex is remembering it the way it seems he is, I've used
the OTHER floppy (out on loan with the OEM CD) in the past in this situation! I
really hope it's that simple (Thanks, Dex, I'll bet you got it).
.
Kiwi
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 |  |  | re: Where is W98's DOS-Level Setup option? (Kiwi: Sat, Aug 28, 2004, 7:39 pm) |
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