boot disk

Command line variety:
1) Take a blank formatted floppy. Insert into FDD and give command sys A: <Enter>
2) As above, but use command format A: /s <Enter>

Either of these will make the floppy bootable, but it will have no drivers on it. As far as I remember, using the ControlPanel method gives you a floppy with CD support, if that is what you mean by "drivers". Cramming in drivers for sound card will probably require something else being dicarded from the floppy. Did you have any particular piece of hardware in mind?

Regards
/RID

hmmmm rid, are u sure that using the control panel method will have cd-rom support? My problem is the system that I wanna re-format can't even get to Windows. That's why I have to re-format the HDD and re-install all the software again. This I'm sure needs cd-rom support right?

I have no 98 machine running here to verify, but bartsmit has a good point in his comment about bootdisk from the 'net... Installing windows needs CD support, yes. Anyway, you could easily try the ControlPanel method: just create a floppy and boot from it. If you can access the CD unit - voilá!

Regards
/RID

heuer

The metho dgoing through the Control panel will create a bootdisk WITH the CDrom drivers for you!

======
Werner

heuer,

Copy your Win98 on a partition from the explorer.
Boot from any floppy and run the installation from where you copy the win98 directory.

You can get a Win98SE bootdisk here:
http://dos.li5.org/IMGS/WIN98SE.EXE

-dog*

guys, the problem now is if I create a bootdisk from the control panel method using my system, running on Win ME and with a different cd-rom drive, will it still work?
 

Why not just boot directly to your CD if your are going to do an install?


The Crazy One

>>>running on Win ME and with a different cd-rom drive

The CD driver is generic meaning it will work for most CD Roms. Note I said most becauese there are some RARE occasions that the generic CD driver won't work.

the installation cd is not a bootable one.

Win ME... gosh. I'd definitely recommend you to get a bootable floppy from www.bootdisk.com for win 98, with CD support. My guess is that anything is better than ME, even a DOS 6.22 bootable would do, if it loads CD drivers.

Regards
/RID

>>>the installation cd is not a bootable one

How do you know for sure. I mean have you tried to boot to it or is this an archived copy of the original CD. Most Win98 CD's are bootable but I suspect that there are some that aren't.

the installation cd is not a bootable one.

You may have a point Rid but it seems from this MS KB that the Emergency Boot Disk is pretty much the same as the Win98 one. But it may balk at letting the Win98 setup CD from being able to install the Win98 OS.

http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q272241

Emergency Boot Disk
The Emergency Boot Disk creates a RAM drive, and extracts the following files to it:
Attrib.exe
Chkdsk.exe
Command.com
Debug.exe
Edit.com
Ext.exe
Extract.exe
Format.com
Help.bat
Mscdex.exe
Readme.txt
Scandisk.exe
Scandisk.ini
Sys.com

Boot Options for the Emergency Boot Disk
Help
Start computer with CD-ROM support
Start computer without CD-ROM support
Minimal Boot

SO use the link I provided to create a standard Win98 boot disk, which does have Generic CD-ROM drives that work for nearly any CD-ROM/CD-RW drive, connected via IDE/ATAPI or SCSI (major cards/vendors anyway).  Then copy the \winme folder to the harddrive like so:

c:
cd \
md winme
copy X:\winme c:\winme

Where X: is the drive letter assigned to the CD-ROM drive, and winME is the folder where the WinME .CAB files are (assuming the folder is called WinME, I've never installed that scary software).

-dog*

thank you guys