Trying To Install Windows 98 On An Old Compaq Xp Laptop

Hi, I have a simple plan for an old Compaq laptop, unfortunately I'm finding it really difficult. I have an old Evo N1015v Compaq laptop with a phoenix bios, and it's currently running very slowly Windows XP. I wanted to install Windows 98, so I fitted a different hard drive in case things went wrong . Getting the dos partition up and running was simple using an old Windows 98 startup floppy, but I couldn’t get it to recognize the DVD Rom drive and the Windows 98 CD wouldn't boot on its own. Going into the BIOS I found only a primary master IDE device is mentioned, the hard drive, there is no way to bring up the IDE DVD rom drive. There was an option to boot from the CD, it was already set and I made sure the CD drive the first boot drive. But that didn’t work. I went back to the old hard drive and there was no problem, XP recognised DVDs and would boot (sort of) from the XP Compaq recovery disc, but even there it booted to a ram drive, and when I exited recover, I couldn’t use “DIR” to look at the CD directory, no drive letter seems attached to it. I tried the recovery disc with the Win98 (to be) hard drive, and it complained it couldn't access the DVD drive, drive Q, but when I retried I was able to use dir to look at the directory. I then put the windows 98 disc in and entered setup, but the dos was the wrong version or something like that and it refused to proceed. Rebooting without the XP recovery disc and I was back to square one. Any ideas of how to proceed

 

Have a look over here.
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/win98/install98cd/indexfullpage.htm
http://www.putergeek.com/win98_install/

Unfortunately I have no firsthand experience with installing Windows 98.

 

A Windows 98 CD is not bootable - I do remember that.

Also Windows 98 is not plug and play. For example, USB sticks will not be recognized until you install a driver. I remember have a universal USB driver for 98 that I needed to install.
I also had devices (CD, DVD) in an external case and I had to see if there were any drivers to get that particular case recognized.

Truthfully, I think you will encounter lots and lots of issues before you get 98 installed. I don't think you'll find 98 drivers for that 14 year old laptop. All the drivers I see offered are for XP, which came installed.
The battery probably needs replacing. I'm not sure you'll have luck finding a replacement battery in which case the laptop needs to be plugged in to work.

10 years ago, someone installed SUSE
http://www.linuxformat.com/wiki/index.php/Evo_N1015v
but wasn't able to connect to the internet because of drivers.

Keep XP on it and use the DVD drive to watch movies.

 

from what i remember, in order for a win98 boot floppy to see and use the cdrom drive, you needed to add files to the boot floppy, and add some lines to the autoexec.bat and config.sys files on the boot floppy.

this web page came the closest to what i remember
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...e-cd-rom-drivers-from-windows-98-startup-disk

good luck with it.

 

Go to http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm get a Win 98(se) disk with the CD ROM driver included.
You can make a bootable Win98 CD, taking that img file and something like WinISO, and adding the boot image BTW.
If not just boot off the floppy and see drive letter the CD is assigned.

To prepare the drive you might need to fdisk & format. Then run setup.exe (I think it's been a while)

 

You have to make sure you have the floppy disk that comes with the CD in order to install.