KillDisk and 98se?

[MaxRat]

Hey...

I need to re-do a drive on a 98se machine.....I am going to use Killdisk and zerofill the drive....

Question is can I re-install win98se with just the cd after doing this? and how?

I want to make sure I keep my cd-rom support as in some cases of a real botched up drive it looses it when I do the enum trick? Thanks

[edfair]

After zero fill it is like a new drive. You can use just the CD if your system allows you to change the boot order to CDROM at any location. If you don't have that option you'll need to keep an emergency boot floppy to be the boot device.
There are several ways you can not have CD support after a new install, but if the old install allowed an emergency boot disk with CD support ENUM forced hardware detection will load the correct drivers, except in the case of those glue chip drivers for the devices that don't have a proper .inf file (intel bbx chipsets and possibly VIA 4in 1 are two that come to mind)

[MaxRat]

thanks...
Okay ....pop the cd in and what's the correct procedure after that...? just d:\setup or do I have to fdisk too?

[GaryRouth]

Hi gsrat

As edfair mentioned, once you've zero-filled a drive, it's like bringing a new one home from the store.

1) Enter Bios Setup at computer startup.
2) Set the 1st boot device to the CD-rom.
3) Place your Windows 98se CD in the drive.
4) Exit the Bios Setup screens by selecting "Save Changes & Exit"
5) When asked whether to boot to hard drive or CD, choose CD.
6) From the next menu of 3 choices, choose "Start Computer with CD-rom support"
7) From the command prompt, type "fdisk" without the quotes.
8) If you've zero-filled the drive, selecting option 4 to view current partitions should give you the answer that "there are no partitions present".
9) Use option 1 to create a Primary DOS Partition
10) If you will be using just one partition, let fdisk use all available space & let it mark the partition as "Active" (meaning the partition that DOS/Windows will use to boot from)
11) Exit fdisk, and restart the computer.
12) Let it boot again from the CD, and this time choose, "Start Windows Setup from CD"

Let Windows Setup detect that the drive needs formatting, and let it use FAT32 to format it (you do this by answering "Yes" to the question "Enable Large Disk Support?").

Then follow the prompts. I like to recommend Custom installs, this will let you control which accessories, communications tools, system tools, etc. that will be installed along with the basic system files.

Best of luck
. . . Gary

[MaxRat]

thank you....

[MaxRat]

do I really need them with windows 98se? The pc I re-did has a Tyan board and the only number on the board is S1846....so I went to driverguide.com and all I found were the bios driver (to flash the bios) I just let windows install everything and it did all except the USB drivers. so there not functional? I didn't have any luck at the Tyan web site either?

[edfair]

Sometimes the M/B manufacturers have included some later drivers with their support because they have found that the OS has problems, or left something out.

Personal take is that currently manufactured stuff may have improved hardware parts that were not available when the OS was written and possible timing problems or interface problems would have been worked out by the supplier of the board. But that is me.

You might want to download and use one of the hardware identifier programs, Belarc advisor, Sysoft Sandra, or Mitchell (was AIDA32) to see what the chipset on the board really is, then possible download drivers from the chipset manufacturer.

I'm certain that others that fight the battle regularly will add further comments.

[glc]

That's an Intel 440BX motherboard and needs no drivers, all chipset drivers are native to 98SE. Check the bios to make sure USB is enabled.

[edfair]

GLC,
Isn't that one of the Intel chipsets that corrupts the chip drivers and loses secondary channel, and can't get it back because of missing .inf files in the OS?
Curious only, and whether somebody should warn gsrat if it is.

[glc]

Not that I'm aware of, the 440BX and 98SE get along better than just about anything else out there.

[edfair]

All the resources I had used on a previous problem are no longer visible so I can't find the references, but there were problems with SE missing .inf files for some IDE glue chips and therefore being unable to reload drivers when the system was reloaded if you didn't have the M/B driver CD. Think it was a Gateway 2K and something like a 87xxx bridge chip.

I was able to get back to the Intel site and the .inf update patch is still available under desktop systems and 440 chipset. Specifically mentioned was AGP and USB problems. The drivers were in SE but the .inf files pointing to them were missing.

[MaxRat]

Thanks for the replies....

Running it all and seems fine....again thanks...