os2fan2

To install windows 9x on a computer, you need a disk formatted in fat or fat32. The 98 fdisk should not be able to do that. Try instead for a proggie like delpart.exe (free microsoft), or free fdisk. These will delete partitions of any type under DOS. Then partition, and format the drives under DOS (win9x boot diskette). You can then install win9x.

Proggies like isolinux, or diskemu [at http://www.nu2.nu/ ] should boot diskette images. None the same, you still need to load a cdrom driver in DOS, and because you are enulating a diskette, access to the real floppy does not always work. You can use eltorito.sys to boot the cdrom where there exists a path via memdisk, eg isolinux or diskemu.

Windows 98 includes a program called batch, which provides the means for unattended install. You find this on the Windows 98 cdrom. This includes a file optional.ini. 98Lite is a proggie that is used for de-installing loads of additional features from Windows 98, 98SE and ME. It does not work with 95 or OSR2. Basically, you can uninstall great numbers of features, and there are fixes to others as well. You can also launch the Win9x startup under 98Lite, which means that the features are not even installed to uninstall. 98Lite is $ware, but well worth it, if you want to squeeze Win98 into tight spots. I ran Win98 on a box with 16 MB ram, this was only allowed with 98Lite. Unlike, say xplite, 98lite integrates completely into the win9x setup, both initial and maintainence. xplite remains a stand-alone program, available after setup. nlite reduces the install cdrom, so unlike 98lite or xplite, it does not give you the option of installing/uninstalling features as you go.

My reccomendation is this: Make c: a small fat partition, say 1/4 GB If you plan to run bartPE, make another primary partition. This becomes the X: drive. It can be quite small too, eg 1/2 GB The rest becomes extended partition. 1. Make one or two OS partitions, around the 4G mark. You can use one to rescue the other, if need be. 2. Create the rest into about three partitions (games, work, scrap). The idea here is that most of the stuff gets done in the scrap partition, and it is quite easy to reformat it and start again, without fussing with your setup. Most user data should go onto the work partition, leaving the OS partition largely free for other things. W

I have decided to add things to the standard DOS 6.22 Help file (HELP.HLP). Most of this comes from these sources 1. commands.txt (in the MSDOS supplement package) 2. assorted Win9x readme files 3. MGDX's page on msdos.sys The idea is, that if you install the qbasic.hlp system, you would have relevant information for the more recent Windows. Since the 'edlin' command from WinNT is not only DOS compat, but runs under MS-DOS 5 and above, and PCDOS 5,0, i have included these docos as well. It also has the feature of being quite usable as an EDIT.HLP as well. This means that if you patch the clear string EDIT.HLP to HELP.HLP in QBASIC.EXE, and use my form of the help file, the qbasic editor will allow you to have the help page open when you edit files. It has all of the error messages in the correct place, for the QBASIC, EDIT and HELP systems, also it has a much better documentation file for making these files.

The 98lite install creates four options, micro, sleek, chubby and overweight (normal). The first one is best avoided, since a good number of programs make use of the extra functionality in the W98 shell32.dll. There is an alternate shell-file based on Win95, that uses shell.w95, which you then add over the top of win98 sleek. There is an article by c't, on making Windows 9x boot from a ramdisk. This appears to be the basis of a number of efforts to make a 9x boot cd. I plan soon to start making one of these myself.

Put a reg file in a startup folder?

installing ie6 is a matter of putting a properly formatted iebatch.txt into the ie6 directory. It then chugs away - no questions, no prompts, nothing. Not even a reboot. You can add extra stuff (eg the autopatch-version of the tweakui) at the same point. W

You probably can't format it during install. I suspect that it would be better to run the fdisk proggie from a batch file before running setup. This is how i run win2k setup. In essence, the whole point of unattended install is that you don't have to attend it: you can easily walk away and make a cuppa. It really does not matter that setup/whatever is running. If you set up your floppy disk right, you can have the default boot pass to the hard drive, so that when it reboots, it goes to the hard drive. This means you can leave your floppy disk in the drive! W

I always enjoyed MDGx's site. He seems cluey on this sort of stuff. None the same, while i have a good number of these OS's, they have not been really used a lot. From having to support different versions, and achieve different ends, i consider the following to be a useful presentation. On the other hand, i tend to be multi-os, so i don't let the subtler distinctions worry me unless it is important. The OS/2 versions mattered because fix-packs were based on it. Windows 9x brings with it a lot of various name-changes, and it is better to deal with the thing as a unified product. Even if one stops at 98se, one still has to make room for "multierrors". At the moment, i have not found sufficient reason to go past the DOS version numbers (ie 0950, 1111, 1998, 2222, 3000), and these are readily accessable to the user in any case. That is, if one sees the dos version as 7.10.1998 one knows one deals with Win98 FE. On the other hand, if there is good reason to depart from this, i would consider it. The idea of using the 95-series OS/R numbers to extend through these five makes some sense, eg 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0. The UI and components are changed essentially at these five points, and the other changes are more akin to point changes, rather than core changes. For example, the shell and the underlying DOS were changed at 1.0, 2.0 and 5.0. 2.0 features the integration of IE, while 5.0 includes some of the rollback features. One finds the 95/98 branding change at 1.0 and 3.0, with 5.0 partly branded as me. One thinks of the intermediate releases like 0951, 1212, 1214, 1999, 2000, as point releases of these products. I normally refer to the beasties as, eg Win0950 or Win2222 or whatever, rather than Windows 98. The NT stream is referred to as Winnt 5.0.4 (2000 sp4) or Winnt 4.0.6a (NT4 with sp6a). I still have not got around to deciding the notation for home/pro/server/data centre, but the final form might be ntpro 5.0.4 or ntsrv 5.2.1. The same sort of thing existed with OS/2 3.x (ie every combination of with or without WinOS2 files, every combination of with or without Networking [one makes this OS/2 3.1], and salmon or blue disks. In version 4 they eliminated this distinction, and made just OS/2 warp. It has been single-version ever since.

By the way, i normally add service packs in the style of a second-point release, eg nt 5,0 windows 2k nt 5,0,0 windows 2k SP0 nt 5,0,4 windows 2k SP4 So the form of this version of Win9x might be osr 4,0,0 raw win98se osr 4,0,2 win98se + sp2 osr 4,1,2 win98se + sp2 + 98me pack BTW, i have been doing this ever since win3x days win300 windows 3.00 win305 windows 3.00 + Multimedia extensions win31x windows 3.1x win33x windows 3.1x + workgroups addin There really was a win310, win311, win330 and win331. win311 (ie 3.11 with no workgroups) was an OEM release only win330 (ie 3.10 + workgroup extensions) was a very slow proggie, dubbed "windows for warehouses". warehouses and workgroups are the same length and suitable for hex-editing. W

I usually use the four-digut build-number when indexing these, treating the whole as one type win9x 0950 original win95 release win9x 1111 OSR2.x releases [Here is OS/2 envy at its height.] win9x 1998 original win98 release win9x 2222 98SE version win9x 3000 Windows multi-errors. I suppose you could always go for OS/R [operating system / real mode], and continue this through. OSR 1 Win95A, B 1,0 1,1 OSR 2 Win95C, D, E 2,0 2,1 2,5 OSR 3 Win98 3,0 OSR 4 Win98SE 4,0 OSR 5 WinME 5,0 This treats the whole lot as a single stream, at the major upgrade points, etc OSR/3 is not in my collection, although i do have the rest! Likewise, the NT releases are handled on WinNT numbers, NT 3,1 NT 3,5 NT 4,0 NT 5,0 win2k NT 5,1 winxp NT 5,2 win2k3 NT 6,0 leghorn

I did a lengthy discussion at 911forums on doing windows 3.1 on a cdrom and ramdrive. But yes, you can do windows 3.1 on a floppy, usually involves unpacking an archive to a ramdisk.

Boot from a DOS disk, and reset the attribute of the registry from there. It should then clear the lock in Windows.

metapad is pretty much the same size as notepad, and allows you to load things like unicode, unix, etc. It also allows you to change the format of the saved document. it comes in two forms (normal = uses richedit library) vs (le = uses "edit" control). One needs to remember that the small ones wrapped around windows functionality also are restructed to what riched and comctl are prepared to allow. On the other hand, the bigger ones load their own editor window, and pretty much do what they use. I use in part metapad, and in part tse v 4,0 to do text exiting. W

You can dual boot win2k and winxp, on installing them on any order. you can even copy the ntldr and ntdetect.com via the $oem$ structure. W

I visited http://www.blkviper.com of late, and it appears the site has a different owner / content. It's currently listed as "under construction", rather than the excellent content on windoze customisation it formerly had. Has the site moved etc?

You could use BartPE. I imagine if you uncompressed, but left name-unchanged, those files that BartPE uses, you could reduce the size of the image with -duplicates-once. You then set up the assorted oem-installs, say in a ramdrive, and then use some of script to build the oemfiles in ramdrive. Or since we're using -duplicates-once, you could then have something like \laptop\$oem$ vs \penning\$oem$ vs \porky\$oem$ You then have the unattend.cmd and unattend.txt, and launch the commands from bartpe. To boot, you also have a rescue disk. I also do a delsetup.cmd at the same time, for removing undesirable setups. I do this in this way, except i copy the source files to hard drive, and have the oem-files separately. The unattend.txt and unattend.cmd files are built from a common source-file, that has embedded in it the locations of the $oem$ directories. This allows you to upgrade the $oem$ and i386 trees separately, while still doing an unattended install.

One might as easily consider WinXP to be an eXPensive downgrade of Win2k. Alternately it is a point upgrade plagued with lots of stuff where M$ is pushing vendors off the market.

95c does indeed support fat32 system, essentially the main break between 95 and 98 is between 95b and 95c. You can even do things like remove all of the stuff like the ISP vendor stuff, etc. You can indeed get win95c oem to install from a cdrom, in non (rebuild system) mode. It's a pretty straight forward hack, involving setupp.inf . You look through the file (there's a whole swag of these files in the first two cabs. You can play around with these). Look for the string "ProductType=", and it should have a number after it like 0 or 1. Change this to 9, and setup will think it's installing off a floppy disk (ie it won't prompt for a product id, and it won't demand a new hard disk). I'm not too sure about adding your own drivers in the install. Never tried it. But i have a copy of 98c with great swags of useless stuff trimmed out of it.

Try these plugins of mine http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10048 This is my shell plugins: these mainly fix up BartPE's lack of timezone, etc. http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8358 Endbuild, and assorted plugins. http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=9812 A more recent version. http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8869 Tidy plugins (ie they remove files not required) Wendy

They're actually waiting for the roll-up to hit the streets before they advance. It is going modular like other versions of the proggie.

Is there room on this fixpack for the novoltrk.reg file? This prevents Win9x from overwriting diskette labels from other vendors: see Info: http://freedos.maussner.net/freedos/news/html-old/1497.html File: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/win9x/ download novoltrk.zip for the reg file. W

I use a home-grown rexx script kml.rex. It ain't flash, but it's very portable, very small [whole proggie + runtime + files fit on a floppy], and it looks after internal links quite nicely. Look at http://www.geocities.com/os2fan2/gloss/index.html and all of the dependent pages for an idea of what it does.

You could look for example, in the Plugin folder for something by me (Wendy) of the title "delnetwork" or "delnetwk". There's also a "delfonts" plugin, that allows you to add and remove fonts.