Adventures in Windows 98SE

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Fritigern

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This thread is mainly a plea for assistance to the members of this forums, if the moderator wants to move this to the proper forum feel free and I apologize for its improper placement.

With that aside, my situation is this. My friend's brother dumped his spyware riddden, haven of fragmented and missing Windows files laptop on me with the intention of paying me 20 dollars to get it running properly. He said he doesn't mind if I format the hard drive and reinstall Windows...the whole nine yars. However there is one problem. This laptop does not have a floppy drive!

Here are my questions. Can I even reformat Windows 98 without a boot disc in the FLOPPY drive? Seeing as the Windows 98SE disc itself must be in the CD drive to initiate a format, I cannot burn the boot disc files onto a CD since it obviously is lacking dual CD drives.

Also, how do I know which drivers I need to back up and put back on once, if ever, I successfully format? In Device Manager Windows states that the provider, and location, of most of the key drivers (Motherboard, Sound, Gfx Card) are located in WINDOWS, and supplied by Windows? Do I need to back these up? Will Windows atuomatically replace them?

Thanks a MILLION for any help you might be able to give me! After all, I need 20 bucks! :p
 
First look at this awesome way to back up all the drivers posted by EricB..

http://www.techist.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=65989

As for the install...I dont think the Windows 98 CD has the FDISK tool or FORMAT tool on it. What you could do..given that you have another computer to do this with a CDR-W drive and burning software...is create a windows 98 boot disk which you can get from here http://www.bootdisk.com/ then insert this floppy into your computer and use a burning program like Nero to make a "bootable CD" you will then select to use floppy immulation and point it to your A:\ drive.

It will then make a win98 bootable CD which you can use to format the drive via FORMAT C: .

Once formated shutdown the laptop and insert the Windows 98 CD (which is bootable) and start the install from the 98 CD. Just be sure to set the laptops bios to boot from the CD first.
 
wow thanks alot Win2kpatcher, good advice.

Fortunatley for me the computer I'm on right now does indeed have a CDR-W drive and I have Nero installed already. The only part I am sketchy on is "floppy emulation", I'm gonna assume this is an option within Nero, to tell it to emulate the floppy onto the blank CD you have in your drive. Either way, thanks a million man!
 
No problem..Yep inside nero once you select to create a Bootable CD-ROM it will have a section that says exactly that..floppy emulation then choose your floppy drive with the boot disk in it.
 
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