FatBeaver

I'm struggling to use SYS on the USB thumbdrive to make the main harddrive bootable (to run the win98SE installer from that), it says that it will only work on the C: drive, which is the USB thumbdrive itself. Do I have to find a different version of SYS from somewhere, or am I doing something wrong?

Ah yes, I realise now that I kinda missed a step by running the win98 installer from the bootable USB drive instead of using sys from that drive and then running the installer once I had booted from the hard drive, sorry for the trouble. It'll be a little annoying to lose everything, but it shouldn't be too bad since I've not had the opportunity to do much, and I totally agree with you that it's not really an acceptable result. Thanks again!

I was able to make the setup run using @MrMateczko's solution (borrowed a windows 7 machine from a friend), I didn't end up needed to use any other files on the drive because I had already formatted the target drive using gparted on a thumbdrive. The only slight issue I encountered was that I had to install the OS on drive d:\ because the bootable flashdrive was c:\. After install everything has gone smoothly, except for some reason the OS won't boot directly from the harddrive, I have to have the USB drive in the machine and choose to boot from that, then it automatically boots windows. I've checked that windows is installed on the right drive, and can verify this when windows is running by looking at the sizes of disks. P.S. Thank you so much for your quick answers, and sorry for the delay, I've been away from my computer for a while.

I've created a bootable WinME bootdisk on a USB thumbdrive (neither CD or floppy are available to me) and it only gives the options "boot from Hard Disk" and "Boot from CD-ROM", no DOS prompt or any way that I can see to get to one to follow those steps. I've also attempted to use a Win98SE bootdisk on a thumbdrive, however when booted it endlessly asked me to provide it the location of COMMAND.COM, even when given the correct path (C:\COMMAND.COM). I verified that this was the correct path by connecting the USB drive to a different computer and looking through the files. Lastly I tried each of them on a harddrive, (thinking that it may be an issue with USB drivers) but both of them gave the same I/O error and refused to boot.

I'm using a full install FreeDOS 1.2, and while its internal help file lists that option for the /OEM switch as being available (as well as several others not listed on that help page you linked), when the sys command is actually used it fails and returns "SYS: unknown OEM qualifier W9x" and shows only three possible options for it: "FD", "EDR", and "DR". I'm not sure if this is a FreeDOS bug or me missing something, but for now it looks like that method won't work. If you're interested I can post the full details from the internal help file, and how they differ from those on that webpage.

I'm currently trying to get windows 98 second edition installed on a modern PC. I've read through multiple guides, mostly here but with a couple of things from vogons, and I think I've completed all steps needed to make win98 work with more RAM. My install procedure is uses two drives, a 1TB HDD and a 240GB SSD, both formatted with single fat32 partitions of 64GiB. The drives are running in IDE mode. The HDD has freedos installed, as well as a folder containing the win98SE install files (which don't seem to be bootable directly, hence the use of freedos). I intend to install win98 on the SSD. I've made all changes to BIOS settings that I think I need to (disabling all but one CPU core, IDE hard drive mode) though I could easily have missed something. So far I've booted freedos successfully and started the win98 setup.exe (with the /nm switch). Tt starts fine, running scandisk with no errors and then moving on to "Setup is preparing the Windows 98 Setup Wizard, which will guide you through the install process" with a percentage underneath, but when it reaches 100% setup stops with the error "SUWIN caused a Stack Fault in module SUWIN.EXE at 0003:3A66". I've struggled to find much information on this error, but it seems to be a memory issue. As a result I ran a memory test on the system and had no issues, so I'm not really sure what could be causing it. My only idea is possibly an issue with freedos's memory manager, but since I don't have a bootable win98 setup I'm not sure how else to do the install without it. Could anyone put forwards any other ideas for what I could try to fix/get around the issue? Basic system info of the machine I'm trying to install on: RAM: 4GiB, 1.333MHz CPU: i5-2500 @ 3300MHz