Need help with Newer OS

[CMT]

First off I read here daily and you guys are super helpful Here's My thing a Friend of mine bought A older used computer which runs fine but it has Windows 95 she bought a Windows 98 SE disk and wants to remove 95 and throw the 98 on I believe first I need to Reformat the Hard drive emptying it???? then install new could anyone give me a Step by Step thnks alot

[Markoman01027]

Welcome to the PC MECH forums CMT!

You will want to format the drive first and then repartition the drive.

Windows 98SE will do that automaticly for you. All you have to do is go into the BIOS and set it to boot with your CD-ROM first. Put in the Windows 98SE CD, Save BIOS settings and it will reboot your computer.

The computer will boot from the CD and then you have 3 options. 1 to enter Setup, 2 to enter DOS, and I forgot what # 3 was. But you will want to hit 1 and then it will ask you to format the drive and recreate your partition.

That is the easiest way to start over! Post back if you need anymore help!

[not important]

Be sure you have all the drivers for the computer .

[GaryRouth]

How old is the old computer? To run Win98 well, the PC should be a Pentium 133 or better. 64 to 128 mb of memory help those oldies with Win98 also. And the hard drive would be best if 2gb or larger.

If the machine is older than the specs above, then Windows95 is probably a good match for it. Win95 runs fine with as little as 32mb of memory, even on 486 class computers. (I ran Win95 happily for years on a 486 with 40mb of that old slow memory [remember Simms?] - and it was a quick little OS)

There are also issues with OEM maker boxes: if this is an old Compaq, there can be a proprietary partition on the hard drive that needs to stay there, because it holds bios information. (it would show up in fdisk as a Non-Dos partition). Drive overlay issues have to be looked for, too - in case the hard drive is using something like Ez-Bios to overcome motherboard bios limitations. And lastly, there are some things that just don' t upgrade well to Win98 - such as old Cirrus video cards, who's drivers top out at Win95. not important's suggestion to check for the availability of Win98 drivers for everything is a good one.

Post again if you have more questions
. . . Gary

[hmmm . . . one last thing: if she bought an "upgrade" version of Win98, she could actually upgrade from within Win95, though to get the benefits of the FAT32 file system, she'd have to convert the partitions]

[hmm . . . another last thing . . . should the computer be recent enough that Win98 is a good match for it, I like to use a Win98 floppy to boot from, run fdisk to delete the current partitions (leaving non-Dos partitions alone), creating a Primary DOS partition, and then running setup and letting the Win98 installation format the drive with FAT32 (answer "Y" to "Enable Large Disk Support?") just like Markoman advised]

. . . and welcome to the Pc Mechanic forums