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Evil, evil question.

Okay. I'm admitting defeat with regards to trying to get my university to publish even web-based study guides in Linux compatible formats. They won't. I don't know why they won't, but they won't. I have two PCs, both currently loaded with current SuSE 9.0 Professional.

I need to back one off to Windows 98 SE (the cheapest version of Windows that I could find for sale).

The problem is that all I have is the Windows 98 SE CD-ROM, which seems not to be bootable.

I suppose I could use WINE to run the install software, but I need the DLLs and CABs from the CD in order to install the CD and that's a Catch-22 that I don't know how to get out of.

Can anyone out there give me a newbie's level tutorial on how I'm going to do this?

I suppose what's missing is a boot disk for the PC that I'm trying to install Windows on. I could do this as a dual boot, with SuSE and Windows 98, if that helps, but I still don't know how to get the installer on the Windows CD to run. I can see it, but I can't run *.exe programs until it's installed and I can't install it until I can run SETUP.EXE.

Whudamigonnado?

Regards

Firefly

http://bootdisk.com/

and in regards to installing Win98, do the following:
Boot from a boot disk to dos with CD support

create directory structure c:\windows\options\cabs\
(needs to be done one directory at a time)

Code:

copy %cd drive%\win98\*.* c:\windows\options\cabs\

cd windows\options\cabs

setup.exe

installing like that (from the cabs on the HD) is beneficial 2 ways:
1) actual install time faster (once cabs are copied to HD)
2) you will not need the windows CD when you make system changes (such as adding/removing windows components).

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I knew you guys would know the way out of this mess.

I'll dig around this evening when the kids are down and see what I can do.

Regards,

Firefly

I've been messing around with this to no avail (so far).

I haven't copied the CABs over. My problem is more basic than that.

How do I get the CDROM drive to be visible to the bootdisk system?

As far as I can see, all I have is A and C. No D.

I don't understand how I'm going to install Win98SE on a drive when I'm running the installer from that same drive (if I follow your instructions on copying the CABs to C first).

If I'm supposed to format the C drive first, then I don't have any way of copying the data from the CDROM to the newly formatted C drive if I can't see the CDROM from DOS.

I know I'm not getting something here. What am I missing?

Regards,

Firefly

Its a while since i used DOS but iirc:

you need to get a boot disk that supports cdrom, or you get a cdrom driver (oakcdrom.sys is usually fine) and add the following line to config.sys

DEVICEHIGH=A:\OAKCDROM.SYS /D:CD1

and the following to autoexec.bat

LH A:\MSCDEX.EXE /D:CD1 /L:x

The /L:x switch assigns the drive letter, so change it to whatever you want your cd drive to be

Just out of interest, what format are the study guides published in? perhaps they can be converted, or there may be a program that will read them available for linux. Installing win98 should be a last resort :)

Quote:

Originally posted by {O_o}
Just out of interest, what format are the study guides published in? perhaps they can be converted, or there may be a program that will read them available for linux. Installing win98 should be a last resort :) [/B]

I'll check out the autoexec file. There is a fly-by message about atapi drives, so I think a driver is being loaded. These have always worked with generic drivers.

The problem is that there is executable code embedded in the web pages - I can't do the quizzes, I can't do the drill downs into anatomical details, I can't use anything except the "virtual book" and the index.

I need that other stuff. My lab instructor speaks about 60 words of English and none of them are (apparently) the anatomical terms she's supposed to be teaching us.

Regards,

Firefly