95-98 upgrade

My friend has an old win95 box and I'm gonna upgrade it to 98se with an upgrade disk. The only reasons for this are to gain usb and fat32 support. The question I have is when it asks for the cd key will I have to enter the win95 cdkey or will a win98 cdkey work? I want to save everything thats on the drive and not have to re-install stuff...ya know...leave the registry intact. He has a new copy of win98se/full and it won't do an upgrade from within win95. I have a copy of 98se/upgrade. Could I just use the cd key from his disk? We can't find the cdkey to win95

 

You can get his original W95 key from the registry this way but I believe it will only want the ProductKey from the W98SE Upgrade.

Start>Run, key in Regedit and press enter. Click on Edit>Find, key in ProductKey and click on FindNext.

If for some reason the Search doesn't locate it, you can navigate to this location in the registry and you'll find it in the Right pane just after you click on the CurrentVersion key in the Left pane.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\ CurrentVersion

BTW, its been a while since I've run a W98 upgrade and I could be mistaken but I'm pretty sure you'll also need to have the W95 CD. I wish I could remember for sure but it's been a long time since I've done one.

 

I had to rename win.com to win.old , Windows to win95 , and loaded 98 from dos. My upgrade cd was for 98 1st edition only and my friends cd was an oem full install. Then I had to drag and drop misplaced files. I had to fdisk and format the unrecognized [over 2 gig] part of the drive. Whew! That was alot of work upside dropping in an upgrade cd