Reinstall of Win98

[roomwithamoose]

I am getting ready to do a completely fresh install of Win98 on an older machine. It was my aunt's before she got a Dell. Originally it had Win95 on it, so I've got the Win95 discs with the Win98 upgrade disk. How do I go about reinstalling? Do I put Win95 on, then upgrade it to WIn98? Or will it prompt me when to put in Win95 discs if I put in the Win98 disk?

[bailey]

it will prompt you for a disk, then you will place the w95 cd in and then after it says ok, place the 98 disk back in and finished the install.

[roomwithamoose]

Now to do this, do I go into the BIOS and change the boot sequence to cdrom, and put in the cd?

[glc]

That's the easiest way (boot with the 98 CD), unless you want to dump the cabs onto the hard drive and install from there.

[roomwithamoose]

Okay, I got a new cdrom for the WIn98 machine, the old one was certainly bad. Now when I go and change the boot sequence to CDROM first in the BIOS, then reboot, it tells me to put the bootable media into the cdrom. Well, I do just that, hit enter, then it tells me the same thing again. What am I doing wrong? I then put the startup disk in that I made for Win98, but that didn't accomplish anything for me.

EDIT: Just to let you know, I'm trying to reformat the entire hdd so that all four partitions (ea. about 2 gb) are one partition. I can't figure out how to reformat the entire drive, but I've figured out how to reformat each partition seperately.

[glc]

Boot with the bootdisk and run FDISK, choose YES for large drive support - you have to remove all the logical drives and partitions. In this order - logical drives in the extended partition(s), then the extended partition(s), then the primary DOS partition. Then you can use FDISK to make a single primary DOS partition. If the CD won't boot, you can run setup with the bootdisk - start with CD support, change to the CD drive, setup. Setup should offer to format the drive for you as long as it has a partition.

[roomwithamoose]

Okay cool, I got the partitions deleted. Well, mostly. I still have two partitions, but I can't delete either. I have a D and an E drive. How would I rename the D to C? I'm assuming that not having a C drive has something to do with Setup freezing right after Scandisk.

PS- Just want to say thanks for all the help to everyone in the past few days! I've been learning a lot, and I still have tons more to learn! Thanks!

[glc]

You have not completed the partition removal with Fdisk.

Let's make it simple.

http://www.juliatexas.com/delpart/delpart.exe

Stick this on a bootdisk and run it. Nuke all partitions then run Fdisk again to create one primary dos partition, 100% of the drive.

IF Fdisk does not say that you have at least 7800mb available for creating a partition, the machine has a bios issue, possibly a 2gb limit. In this case, you will need an updated bios, a controller card, or a software overlay.

[roomwithamoose]

Cool glc, thanks again. I'll post as soon as I have a chance to try it.

EDIT: Ugh, it seems like it's one problem after another guys. My WinXP floppy drive doesn't recongize my boot disk for the Win98 machine. It asks me if I'd like to format it, which I don't want to do. Is there a way around this?

[glc]

Copy it to a second floppy - then just swap disks after you get the A prompt.