windows 98 install to 2nd hard drive - help

jonnyb

Trying to help a friend's parents.

They had win 98 1st edition but need at least 2nd edition for their printer driver to work.
Had to format their hard disk in an attempt to install an old legal copy of win 98 2nd edition but it kept failing on their pc.:mad:
Decided to plug their hard drive into mine as 2nd master drive, and install from my cd drive.
Obviously won't work as it says my pc already has windows xp.:huh:

Is there any way to get it to install onto their hard drive ?
Currently copying windows cd contents to their hard drive in the hope that will work.
Have not yet got to the point of disconnecting my own hard drive and installing that way, as I know other people have had multiple OS installs.
Any help welcomed.

devizes18193

it womt work beacuse even if you took your drive out and put in parents drive and reinstalled win 98 all the secondry stuff that goses on a in stall would be different .If their drive is failing you will need a new drive put it in parents pc and install off that so its a clean slate so to speak .IF YOU INSTALL IN YOUR PC IT WILL see things like your cpu then when changed something else .ITs the computing of being druged in London sleeping and waking up in new york

Little_John

Its not quite as cut and dried as devizes said, you could put the drive as a single drive in your PC, install windows 98SE then transplant the drive in to the other PC. Don't install any drivers for your PC on the Win98 drive. When you put the drive in the other PC it will moan like hell and you will need to install all the drivers for that PC but it will work. Don't try this with xp or 2000 it doesnt but with 98 it does.

My prefered way of installing windows 98 was to format the drive and make it bootable format c: /s boot the PC to dos with the cd and with cd drivers installed. then make a directory on the hard drive called win98 and copy the contents of the win98 folder from the cd to the folder called win98 on the hard drive.
reboot the PC on the hard drive and run c:\win98\setup.exe from command prompt. this means windows installd from the hard drive makeing the install quicker and you never need the cd once it is installed as the files from the cd are on the drive in the location it was installed from so it automatically looks at that location for the cd when it needs it.

BritBrat

Get a 98SE boot disk and put it on a formated floppy. If you do not have a floppy drive you will have to get a bootable CD.

Then follow these instructions.
HOW TO GUIDES FOR DOS AND WINDOWS 95/98

The hard part is being able to read the CD ROM from the boot disk, once you can do that its easy.

Boot to DOS, enter cd D (assuming your CDrom is "D") then type dir, look for a file called setup or install (Long time since I have done 98) then type "install.exe" or "setup.exe" (without the "") and if your lucky the CDrom will start to spin and Windows 98 will start to install. If you try install and it dont work, try setup next.

BUT, do you have the key for it? as it will ask you for it on the way to installing.

jonnyb

thanks everyone.
did pretty much what littlejohn described, but booted from the win98 floppy boot disk that I had, then copied win98 cd contents to hard disk to install.

just finished moving the hard disk back to their pc and installing the drivers.