HELP! With installing WIN 98 SE.

Factual Questions
1

My daughter Marybeth just got given a computer. Fairly nice one; 100 mhz pentium with a 4 gig HD. It had a BUNCH of junk on it from the previus owner, some of which I’m keeping and some I’m getting rid of. It has Windows 95 on it right now which I’m trying to upgrade to WIN98 SE and therein lies the problem.

When installing WIN98, it asks you to do a “scandisk” first. This I’ve done with no errors reported, but I don’t seem to be able to convince the computer that I’ve done it. Every time I start the setup, it hangs at about the 84% point of the initial check and then tells me I have to do a scan. I’ve done this about 5 times in a row to no avail.

Any ideas about how I can convince the computer that I’ve actually done the scan and that no errors have been reported?

2
  • Try reformatting the disk first, then running the scandisk+install. - DougC
3

Have you tried a thorough scan?

4

If it’s an upgrade win95>win98, then you won’t (easily) be able to format the hard drive and do a clean install of Win98, unless you have the Win95 install disk (Which, I suppose, legally, you should have, or a licence at least).

Anyway, If you do have the wherewithal to install from clean, then that’s what I would recommend; make a boot disk on another machine, boot from it, format the hard drive, then install.

You would be advised to write down the details of your graphics card from Control Panel/display/settings - Windows generic drivers are pretty good except in the area of graphics cards, where it will often just give you 800x600.

5

I think there is a switch you can add so it skips the SCAN but I forgot what the switch was.

You know, like : setup /noscan

You might refer to the docs on this. SE is not gonna be much fun to use in my opinion.

6

Here is a link to the webpage that has the setup switches handy is refering to

http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q186111

/is - This switch causes Setup not to run ScanDisk.

Win98se, while not a perfect OS, is better than 95 for the vast majority of people

7

Problem solved!

For some reason it kept stalling out when I tried to install it from within WIN95. Just for a w00t, I tried installing it from the DOS c prompt and it worked fine.

Thanks, everyone!