I have an older pc, with a botched 95 install, I want to be able to install win 98se on it, however there is no cd rom drive. The drive is 1gb, can I drop a win98 iso on it, and run it from there?
I'm almost certain i've done a Windows 98 install from a hard disk in the past, it went very fast as i remember! It might be easier to put a 2nd HDD in for the install files and then install to C: from there. Just navigate to setup.exe and run it.
Just directly copy all the files off the disk into a folder (name it what you want, but for the sake of reading ease, I'm going to call it Cerv'x). Insert the HDD into the computer (which I'll call Sally). Then make a boot disk (which we are going to call Garry). From here, insert Garry into Sally, tell her to boot off Garry, navigate Sally untill you get into her Cerv'x folder, then enter setup.exe to start. The program in Cerv'x will do a scan of Sally, a self-diagnostic on the mother system I guess you could say. Then if everything checks out OK, it will start to replicate and unpack itself into Sally. So there you have it! One installed system!
This is actually a really great way to go - any time you even view windows 98 network settings it asks you to insert the install disk. If you install from the local hard drive, you don't end up with this issue. As said above, just copy the entire CD to a folder on the HD called win_inst or something like that. Also, if you copy a bootable floppy to the root of the hard drive, you can just boot straight to the hard drive and run c:\win_inst\setup.exe good luck (Note - for best results, there shouldn't be anything else on the drive except for the files needed to boot and the stuff copied from the windows CD.)
QFT. One tip (if you're able to put the CD copy on a separate partition to the OS) is to create a TXT file in the setup folder containing the CD key - always convenient when you re-install. As I had an Upgrade 98SE I also copied Win95 to a folder, and could just point 98SE setup to that folder for a 100% CD-less install.
