by Lady Lee 20 Replies latest jw friends
So if I boot onto the C drive (where I think WIN98 is) will it delete the WIN 98? I don't mind if it does. I want it to.
Sounds like it is coming back together for you nicely. Hopefully you don't even need this by the time you read it. If you go to My Computer and open up C: we might get lucky and you will see a folder labeled WIN98. If so, install XP as usual and all should be right with the world. Then you can format your other drives from XP on C: at will.
Respectfully,
AuldSoul
Can I make a boot disk for XP andf include the drivers for the CD-ROM? Would that work?You should be able to boot to the XP install disk simply by inserting the disk and making sure the CD ROM drive is the first boot device in the system BIOS - and restarting the system.
ballistic, on some of the older motherboards the BIOS doesn't support boot from CD. It would depend on what she has for hardware. But now that she has it booting to the C: she can see the XP CD and should be able to launch it from inside the Win98 OS.
Lady Lee, DOS for Win98 is Fat16 or Fat32. It cannot read the file allocation tables on an NTFS drive. Fortunately, CDs aren't as complicated in that respect, so you should be fine once you boot to Win98.
Respectfully,
AuldSoul
Auld Soul
If you go to My Computer and open up C: we might get lucky and you will see a folder labeled WIN98. If so, install XP as usual and all should be right with the world. Then you can format your other drives from XP on C: at will.
YES! The C drive is WIN98. The D drive doesn't have the same programs at all and it has some things installed that the C drive doesn't have.
ballistic
You should be able to boot to the XP install disk simply by inserting the disk and making sure the CD ROM drive is the first boot device in the system BIOS - and restarting the system.
There's the problem. It won't boot WinXP from the CD drive. When I was trying to install WinME I had the exact same problem. While the BIOS saw both CD-ROMs and I could see both of them in the boot sequence, once I got to the A prompt DOS could not see them. I tried disconnecting one at a time to see if that was the problem but DOS still refuses to see them.
Auld Soul
on some of the older motherboards the BIOS doesn't support boot from CD. It would depend on what she has for hardware.
My motherboard isn't more than 4 years old.
But now that she has it booting to the C: she can see the XP CD and should be able to launch it from inside the Win98 OS.
My concern here is that if I boot onto the C drive (where 98 is) and then install XP on top of it I won't have anything to boot from if the system crashes. Am I better off in the long run leaving 98 on the drive and perhaps upgrading that to WIN ME?
Lady Lee, DOS for Win98 is Fat16 or Fat32. It cannot read the file allocation tables on an NTFS drive.
Yes as I was reading about the FAT16/36 and the NTFS drive formats I saw that as an issue. So if I format the C drive as NTFS then I might have no way to boot from WIN98 /DOS
Lee
Is there some specific reason you need to keep an old version of Windows running? It certainly doesn't make sense to keep a second install of Windows purely as a backup boot device. You can create an emergency boot disk for XP just as soon as you have XP installed easy enough.
Also I can't see the point in upgrading the Win 98 to Millenium. All that would achieve is allow you to format all your drives as NTFS as that was the only major difference from 98 to Millenium apart from a makeover, however it still has many security flaws and updates are no longer available for it.
You can create an emergency boot disk for XP just as soon as you have XP installed easy enough.
How? It seems XP doesn't have the same method for creating boot disks as other WIN OSs.
I did find a way to make one though. It installed these files on the XP disk
And I took OAKCDROM.SYS from the 98 boot disk and added it to the XP disk in the hope that when I try to install from as a reboot the computer will see the CD drives.
I totally agree that I don't need 2 OSs on the computer. It is just a waste of space.
I guess the worst that could happen is that I have to reboot onto the C drive is that I would have to reinstall WIN 98
Thanks to both of you for all this. I really appreciate it. I have the "Smart Computing" and the "PC Learning Series" magazines that help me a lot and that is how I learned to do all this stuff - along with trial and error. But they don't answer everything.
Yes, the DOS disk XP allows you to make is quite basic, and I've never used it so I don't know if it has built in CD ROM support or not. A preference to this would be to use the 'safe mode' option by pressing 'F8' when booting to get into a limited fault finding mode Graphical User Interface.
Obviously this would not work if you've had complete hardware disk failure, but neither would any other method allow you to get onto the disk.
I think the important thing here is to concentrate on backing up important data at regular intervals, and not having multiple redundant boot systems which will actually just be making things more difficult if, or rather when, this happens again.
lol I spent all day yesterday copying files to CDs - 6 of them.
I did some wandering on the net and found out how to create the bootable disk for XP. It is very different than the files the XP version created for me. No wonder it doesn't work.
It says
3. Create a Boot.ini file (or copy one from a computer that is running Windows XP), and then modify it to match the computer that you are trying to access. The following example works for a single-partition IDE drive with Windows XP installed in the \Windows folder, but the exact value in the [operating systems] section depends on the configuration of the Windows XP computer that you are trying to access:
If your computer boots from a SCSI hard drive, you may need to replace the multi(0) entry with scsi(0). If you are using scsi(x) in the Boot.ini file, copy the correct device driver for the SCSI controller in use on the computer to the root of the Setup disk, and then rename it Ntbootdd.sys. Change the disk(0) number to represent the SCSI-ID of the hard drive you want to boot to. If you are using multi(x) in the Boot.ini file, you do not need to do this.
4. Start your computer by using the floppy disk, and then log on to Windows XP
But now that she has it booting to the C: she can see the XP CD and should be able to launch it from inside the Win98 OS.My concern here is that if I boot onto the C drive (where 98 is) and then install XP on top of it I won't have anything to boot from if the system crashes. Am I better off in the long run leaving 98 on the drive and perhaps upgrading that to WIN ME?
Lady Lee,
If you still have the Win98 boot disk you made you will have something to boot from. It is unlikely that the XP install will crash your system, and once you have XP installed you can worry about creating the XP boot disk.
I think the best way to manage this, from your description, is to reboot with all drives clear save the first CD drive your Win98 machine identified. If your motherboard is less than 4 years old you should be booting to the XP CD now. If that doesn't work, try to launch from the Win98 boot through Start | Run... which should work fine now that Win98 sees the CD ROM.
One of these two methods should work if everything is configured correctly in your BIOS and with the drives physically (jumpers, cables, etc.).
Respectfully,
AuldSoul
Thank you both so much. I have a much better understanding of what is going on now. I will have to go out and buy some diskettes so I will hold off doing anything else for now.
But I found out what files need to go on the bootdisk
