Windows 98 reinstall project hangup

Hi, I know this seems lame to even be bothering to reinstall win98se to an old pent II Aptiva, but I'm giving it to someone who will appreciate it. It has two HD's, a 8 gig & a 20. The 20 is set up as the slave. I formatted both drives, then when I went to reinstall win98, my floppy flopped. So I went into the cmos and changed it to boot from the cd, that worked ok....its has both a cdrw (E) and a dvd drive (F). So I created a boot cd and ran it from E, then did F:setup it then does scandisk and prepares to install windows, but then it hangs when it tries to copy the windows files. Black screen, cursor flashing, displaying "copying files needed for windows setup " Thats are far as I get. is it toast???

 

If I remember correctly you have to change to the C: drive before typing F:\setup when installing Win98.

If you haven't already done this, try booting from the E: drive then at command prompt type C: then at new C:> prompt type F:\setup.

 

That didn't work either, still hangs at the copying files screen. (See jpeg) I attached a pic of the screen when I boot with the startup cd. I'm thinking maybe I screwed up something with I did fdisk, does it look right?

 

Since you can control the pc copy the 98 CD to hard drive and run fron there.
You only need to copy the win98 folder not the 'xtra' material.

Studio T

 

can you give me the exact command? I also thought I'd mention, when it freezes I always have to shut it down, then when I reboot and run win setup from the F: cd drive it runs scandisk and has to fix both drives, I presume because I screwed up something from shutting it down before.

 

I don't understand your second posted picture.You say that the floppy is unserviceable, but the picture shows the a:\ prompt?

There are two copies of setup on the Windows 98 CD. Use the one in
drive:\win98\ rather than the root one.
Dos syntax is

drive: return
cd win98 return
setup return

I am not sure how you are controllling pc from a boot CD ,what o/s are you booting to ?

Studio T

 

I do this all the time. You need to get a copy of xcopy32, which is part of Win98se, but not installed on the safe disk. I install several extra commands on the DOS safe disk after the fact. What xcopy32 does is copy the entire filenames over. So the sequence I use looks something like this (off the safe floppy and CD), the CD being drive e: due to d: being RAM disk.

xcopy32 e:\win98se c:\win98se /s /e

The computer comes back with:

File or Directories?

To which Directories is the reply.

After you are through the cab files are on the hard disk, and the Win98se CD is never needed again. Just point to the Win98 directory and it treats it as the windows CD.

 

Oh, for stupid, I finally figured out I hadn't formated the C: drive properly, it had some bad areas that had to be repaired, then everything installed fine, duh. My floppy died, so I had to change to boot from cd. Thanks everybody for your help!

 

Glad you sorted it and thanks for reminding me of old commands, Bill M.

Studio T