Installing Win98 on a Laptop

Hi,
I have an Acer laptop which runs Win95. It doesn't work properly at the moment so I decided to install Win 98 SE which I have recently aquired.
Do I have to get rid of Win 95 first? How do I do it?
Can someone explain it to me step by step given that I have never done it before and I'm a beginner when it comes to stuff like this.
Thanks in advance guys.

 

Depends on what version of W98 you acquired.

"Upgrade" versions will allow you to upgrade your current W95 machine.

Some "OEM" versions will only allow you to install on a clean formatted drive.

The W98 installation process is similar to W95. The installation will guide you through a series of wizards. You will be asked to select the options you want to install (or you can choose a "typical" install). W98 will attempt to detect the hardware you're using. Some manual intervention might be required here.

Give it a try. You can always start a new thread on this forum if you hit a particular problem

 

I want to start it clean. How do I format my drive?

 

You'll probably be sorry you asked that question...
Get into a DOS screen and at the c prompt, type in: format c:
You WILL lose everything from the drive, so you better figure out ahead of time how to install W98 from the cdrom.
You can also tell the bios to boot from a floppy, then insert your w95 startup diskette, and do it from there.You will need a startup diskette to operate the computer so that you can install W98
It will allow you to utilize your CDROM drive before the new OS is installed.
I believe W95 uses FAT16 protocol in setting up the hard drive, and w98 uses fat 32 so you may run into a problem there..
Use the DOS command fdisk to setup the drive to FAT32 prior to formatting. Can anyone refute this???
Or should he do something different???

 

Just one thing. Your Win95 startup disk will not have the CDRom drivers you need to install from a CD. You need to use a Win98 bootdisk. If you don't have one, get a friend to make you one or download one fromhere One other thing comes to mind. Can you plug in the floppy drive and CD Rom drive at the same time or do you have to swap them? If you have to swap them then you will need to copy the Win98 CD to the hard drive and run setup from there. Good luck. Kw1

 

Thank you for your quick answers.

Skidood, you are right. Win95 uses the FAT16 protocol. I ran fdisk but I'm not quite sure how to change to FAT32.

Thank you Kilowatt1 for the bootdisk.com. Very useful. The floppy drive and the CD-ROM are plugged in at the same time, so, I guess, it's going to make it easier.

 

If it's a older laptop, I'm not sure I'd suggest installing W98. How much RAM does it have and what size hardrive?

If you do decide to install W98, first your going to need a W98 boot diskette. And before you fdisk or format the drive, I'd suggest booting to the W98 boot diskette and checking to be sure you can access the CDRom drive. Insert the W98 boot diskette and power on the laptop. Assuming it boots from the floppy, select "Start With CDRom Support" from the boot menu.

Somewhere on the screen at the very end, it tells you what drive letter it has temporarily assigned to the CDRom drive. It will look something like this, "Drive X =MSCD001", where "X" is the drive letter that's been temporarily assigned to your CDRom drive for the install. At an a:\> prompt, insert your W98 CD and do this from the prompt to see if you can read the drive. Replace the letter X: in the command below with the letter you noted earlier.

dir X:

You should hear it access the CDRom drive and then it should display a directory list of the CD on the screen. If that occurs successfully then you will have access to the CdRom drive to install W98 from the CD. Do this to install W98 ......

fdisk

Leave the default set to "Y" for large disk support and press enter.

Now use the option to "Delete Partitions". Delete any and all you see listed. Now take the option to "Create a Partition" and create a "Primary DOS" partition. Take all of the defaults during the Primary DOS partition creation.

Now after the PC has restarted, key in the following and press enter.

format c: /s

When it's done insert your Windows CD. Then key in the following command at the prompt and be sure to change the drive letter, "X", to the drive letter that was temporarily assigned to your CDRom drive that you should have made note of earlier.

X:\setup

 

If you FDISK using the Win98 Startdisk it will default to FAT32 if you answer "Yes" to the question about having support for large disks. If you answer no you will get a FAT16 formatted drive.

 

It's got 16 Mb RAM and 1.3 Gb hard drive.
I tried to boot it up using Win98 boot disk and it doesn't work. It says it's a non-system disk or disk error (I downloaded the boot disk from bootdisk.com).

If I use Win95 bootdisk it boots up. The problem with Win95 is that it doesn't start up. There's a warning about a registry/configuration error and then it asks me to start in Safe Mode only to say that this version of Windows runs only on MS-DOS 8.00.

What can I do? If I can make Win95 work I don't need to install Win98. This is a bit out of my league.

 

16MB is the minimum according to Microsoft but I doubt you'll be happy with the performance.

If you still want to install W98, I suspect you didn't build the boot diskette. You can't just download the file from that site to a floppy to make a W98 boot diskette.

Here's what I'd suggest you do

Go <a href=http://www.user-friendly.net/download/download.htm> here </a> and download Boot98se.exe to the hardrive of a functioning PC. Then insert a blank floppy diskette in the same functioning PC and double left click on the .exe to build the W98 Boot Diskette. Once it's finished creating the boot diskette, insert it in the laptop and power it on.

 

To answer your question about the current install of W95 and the errors. My guess is the current W95 install is most likely pretty old. Once you start getting registry errors with W95, my experience has been there's not much that can be done except a reinstall. Your best bet is to reinstall W95 to a clean drive. Do you have the W95 CD? Or install W98 to a clean drive and if you don't like it, then install W95 to a clean drive.

 

I build the Win98 boot disk like you said and it works. Thanks a lot.
I don't have a Win95 CD but I have Win98se CD, so I might as well install it. And if it doesn't work properly I guess I'll have to buy Win95.
I'll give it a try anyway and I'll let you know if it works. Best way to learn is practice (and probably making no mistakes).
Thanks

 

Good luck and be sure to let us know how it went. If you follow the instructions I gave you earlier, you should be fine.

BTW, you may run into some issues with the RAM and W98 but we'll see. You'll know because W98 won't boot. W98 scans the registry in RAM at startup and some older RAM causes W98 to error at startup and it won't boot. It's nothing to do with the amount of RAM. It's related to the age and quality of RAM. The same RAM that worked fine with W95, won't work with W98 but all you can do is install it and see what happens.

 

I've done everything up to and including creating "Primary DOS" partition.
It says I have to shut it down before restarting. It also says, at the bottom of the screen I have to press Esc to exit fdisk. What do I do now? Do I just shut it down or exit fdisk first and then shut it down?
And after I restart it do I leave both the boot disk and the CD-ROM inside the computer or only one or, maybe, none?

 

I'd leave both inside, the CD and the Boot disk. Ya might get lucky and it'll boot from the CD. At any rate, I went through all this with an older Toshiba. 16 RAM isn't really enough for Win98. I found an additional 32mg of RAM from a web site that specialized in Toshiba's for 70 bucks. Also, I had to upgrade the screen drivers, keyboard drivers and a few other things after the Win98 install all provided from Toshiba's web site. If you get it up and running, check the manufacture's web site for these upgrades. I mention Toshiba because this one had 16 RAM and a 1.3 gig HD also.