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Struggling with Win98SE Installer on Modern System


FatBeaver

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23 hours ago, FatBeaver said:

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?

The issue is drive numbering.

When you boot from USB usually disk drives numers are switched and USB becomes first disk, shifting the internal disk to second disk.

Dos will assign C:\ to the first disk primary, active partition, i.e. if you boot from the USB, but I seem to remember that the

SYS C;\ D:\

(say) command should work.

See (only as a reference):

https://web.archive.org/web/20090319045034/http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16713

At the time the procedure was tested, double tested and triple tested, so it did work.

So maybe it is something else. :unsure:

Are you sure-sure that the internal disk has a primary, active partition?

And that that partition is the one that gets D:\ in your setup?

If you use (as suggested earlier) grub4dos, you can remap the drives, then boot from floppy and the internal disk will become C:\ and this will bypass the issue.

You need to get an image of a DOS/Win9x floppy, let's call it mydosfloppy.ima and grub.exe.

Get the latter from *any* grub4dos no earlier than 0.4.4 16-10-2009, this one (latest of the 0.4.5c series) would do:

http://grub4dos.chenall.net/downloads/grub4dos-0.4.5c-2016-01-18/

http://dl.grub4dos.chenall.net/grub4dos-0.4.5c-2016-01-18.7z

and put them in the root of your USB stick booting partition.

Example:

Boot the USB stick to DOS or FreeDOS.

Run grub.exe.

At the prompt issue:

map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

map --mem  /mydosfloppy.ima (fd0)

map --hook

root (fd0)

chainloader /io.sys

boot

When you boot this way, it will be exactly as if you were booting from a real floppy, with the internal hard disk that remains first disk and - provided that there is on it a primary, active partition, that partitin will be "first hard drive" i.e. C:\

jaclaz

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