Thank you so much for the video, I was trying to downgrade an old XP laptop I had laying around to 98 without the official install media or any CDs even and PLOP, after doing weird glitches when it didn’t detect a USB inserted, would just boot strictly as Read-Only making it a struggle to boot off from. I love the work you’re doing for the retro gaming community, Phil! It inspired me to find and buy many newer laptops for cheap which have the drivers available to downgrade down to such old Windows versions while having more than enough of the hardware capability required to play these old games.
Hi Phil, I've created a framework that allows you to install windows 98 from any disk source, including USB, optical drives and SD cards. It is many times faster than the original installer. It takes around two minutes on a pentium 3, and less than one minute on a modern machine. It can include patches and slipstream drivers as well. It can partition hard drives and set the partitions bootable, write MBR, etc. It works on 486 up to the latest machines, the reference ISO and USB images include the necessary patches for that. Let me know if you'd like to try it and maybe show it off. Best Eric
Ahh man 98 the Nostalgia. I've been using the bootable dvd method for a long time myself except I used NERO to create it as bootable, hidden feature inside nero. I can confirm this method works very well even for dos6 to win95 to winME. Cheers Phil.
Copying and installing from the i386 folder is faster as well vs running setup from the disc itself. Asking the CD drive for a bunch of sequential reads vs randoms.
I have owned a Lite-On usb CD/DVD drive for about 10 years now and it's one of the longest lasting purchases I made. I still use it to boot up old systems or play my old games from discs. It's a life saver.
For Win98/ME, I use a USB CD drive to fdisk the drive, and then I connect the drive to my laptop via a USB to PATA/IDE/SATA adapter to format the drive and copy over the installer files. I reboot via USB CD again and use the boot from CD without CDROM support, switch over to the C drive, and run the installation setup. I’ve been doing it this way for most systems/boards except those that will not boot from USB at all. In those cases, I just restore a base disk image to the target drive, and this base image is just a copy of Win98 installation created (using Macrium Reflect) after the first reboot occurs. That way the driver detection and setup is freshly performed. This method works most of the time and does save a little time given it eliminates the fdisk, format, and initial setup/install.
If you're gonna connect the drive to a modern machine anyway, why would you bother partitioning it with fdisk beforehand? At best, it's a waste of time. At worst, if it's an SSD, you'll get unaligned partitions.
About the "wasting discs" part, you can aliviate this with rewritable optical media (I have a few that work great to this day). However, it's not always compatible with old optical drives, but it's not far from the similar problem of burning speeds and the materials that the blank CDs or DVDs are made. The difference is that with the try and error of the rewritable discs you are not wasting them (some of them support a very high count of sessions to rewrite them, but if they are too old, the materials may be at risk as an ordinary DVD or CD).
G'day Phil, I really like these "How to Install Windows..." videos, One of the biggest problems I have had with older Motherboards is getting the OS Installed if it is not a OEM CD/DVD in a 5.25 ODD, setting up the OS instalation file correctly on the media I want to use & finding where to Force the Install in BIOS, but since finding your channel your videos have been a great help relearning how to work with older components again & understanding the little tricks that simplify mating newer technology.
Oida! :) Great video again Phil! I always use a Windows 98 floppy USB image to boot up, run Fdisk for partitioning, format an SSD, and then copy the Windows 98 installation (Drivers, Games etc.) to the SSD from a modern PC. After that, I boot up again from the virtual floppy, run the setup, and proceed with the next-next-finish. :) And if I want to hear the classic sounds, I bring out the real floppy drive. It's so much fun to build a retro PC that I can't even remember if I installed Windows 98 more frequently back in the day because of the blue screen, or nowadays because of the fun factor:)
@@philscomputerlab Hi Phil, maybe an idea for a future friday video, to build a fully Voodoo machine, if it's possible to use a Voodoo3 via AGP, then a Voodoo2 AND a Voodoo1 via PCI on a single board. If W98 can handle it :) but maybe it's a dead idea.
There's also a driver called USBASPI, which you can integrate into Windows 98's boot floppy image and then just create a "regular" CD-ROM with USB boot support. Have you tried this yet?
I have an old CD I made with Nero. It's a hybrid CD which boots emulating a floppy, which loads the cdrom driver, and through that you can access the windows installers.
Back in the day we used to struggle with this. Then we got in a load of Gateway PCs and they all came with boot floppys that fully enabled boot support for CD-Rom. They were worth their weight in gold at the time. We could then install so easy on any PC.
The best one was installing Windows 95 onto laptops with no CD-rom...using parallel laplink cables. Copying all the install files to the HDD from another PC and then running install.exe...bingo! Needs must!
In the past I've used virtual box to mount a physical hard drive. Then I boot a dos virtual machine and do all the formatting, copying and installing I could want. If I'm doing something particularly fiddly with the autoexec.bat or config.sys file I'll just sit there and make changes and boot the virtual machine over and over until it works right. Then I pull it out of my machine and plug it in the old machine. It works fantastic for DOS and pretty well for Windows 95/98.
Phil you looks like my brother :) identically :D you looks like 20 years ol, but you offer 30+ year knowledge. pleasure to watch new videos from you. I work on Windows 98 pc build currently this might come handy
I've always just installed retro OS's from CD/Floppy like the old days. Luckily my years of tech hoarding have left me with plenty of both drives to last a lifetime. Annoys me how many cases these days don't have front drive bays anymore. Found a nice one with 12 bays that I used for building a new main rig though.
These days, like you I have a hoard of PC stuff. I will often use another PC to partition and format/s a drive. Then place install files on a extended partition. Yes that is cheating. I have frustration with those IDE to sata adapters when it comes to optical drives being seen, but not read from. Some of those adapters create alot of bios memory controller devices that it may not know what to do with, and cause conflcts. The new old stock IDE optical drives I have will at least be preserved because I don't burn every new Linux flavor like many people used to. I personally have never tried to install 98 from USB optical drives. I like the idea of having a hub with drive in one. I try to think what the inventors of the PC went through when there wasn't another PC to help things along.
Those USB optical drives generally work for reading with only one USB cable connected. In my experience, you might run into trouble writing discs unless both are plugged in. Great video, thank you!
@@philscomputerlabThis is true. Different media can have different power requirements in the drive. Also, when used as a data port, USB 3.0 can supply more power (900ma @5V) than USB 2 (500ma @5V) so it's entirely possible that a single USB 3.0 connection is enough.
Old "Ghost" could do so much more when pushed .... boot, partition, format, copy Win98 folders to 2 partitions, all in under 3 minutes, reboot and you are greeted by the installer to enter the product key and continue installation, and this took ages! Wasted quite some time to get to that, but i had 3 computer shops so it payed off in spades. Been 20 years now? And, yes it does boot from CD and DVD and USB, it is just booting DOS with the drivers required
Nice! By now, though, I have already made a collection of IDE flash drives ready to simply boot up, prepare the target install media, and then copy over my install routine and all Win98SE files. I will, however, try out this method next time around as per your very welcome recommendations.
I had (when Vista came out) few HP tablets (without optical drives, only internal HDD and USB ports) to downgrade to XP. While at that, I played with dos/win98 on one of these. Booting from USB CD was a feature in BIOS and all install was without issues. Later, I tried to install dos/win95 on few netbooks; they had sometimes problems with booting from a USB floppy but booted well from USB CDs. I remember using Nero (5 or 6) to make dos 6.22 bootable CD; it took a dos boot floppy image (1.44M) that emulated as boot device, it worked with 2.88M floppy images but not 1.2M. I made some image similar with win98 EBD, a compressed folder with dos basic utils that decompressed on a ramdrive and used those tools to partition/format/transfer the system on systems without need of a phisical floppy. On systems with IDE optical, I was able to access the CD and copy programs, games, install kits on the HDD or just run them from the CD.
The early bird got the worm. I got one of these with your link. I was lucky enough to get it for $19 US. The discounts that made that possible are gone. It is a tactic of create demand and then raise the price. I used mine to play a cd as a test. It drew about 150ma on the micro usb plug side since I was using usb 2. I had to use both usb mini and micro usb3 connections to power it. I would favour something like this over a ide to sata adapter that was not optical drive compliant. A case in point I used one of those 2 cap green ones with a M/S jumper, similar to what Phil has. Bios saw it, but Linux ignored it when connected as slave on an optical sata drive. Using that same adapter model a ssd set to master was seen and accessible under Linux Mint on the same channel. I guess the next step is try one of those red Star tech versions that are supposed to be atapi compliant.
My Ultimate MS-Dos 7.1 boot floppy does have USB CD-Rom drivers, but my VIA motherboard doesn't support them and I don't have a USB optical drive. I am curious if the one I implemented in my floppy would work on this as well, as its intended for cases like this.
I have an external DVD Drive manufactured by LG, which is the most friendly for any old OS that I've ever used. It depends mostly from the motherbpard propieties and/or the manufacturer (both the drive and the motherboard), because the goal to install sucesfully Windows 98 SE is make sure that the IDE protocol would be avariable or MS-DOS will refuse to recognize the hosting optical drive for make effective the installation proceeding.
great video. I just installed w98 on a machine that had a very limited bios, so much so that it would only recognize the usb mouse and keyboard that was used during install, (no ps2 port on mobo) but then after installed and boot up with the mouse and keyboard I could plug others in and once it recognized them I could boot using them also. Crazy .. and there was no continue on errors in bios so no mouse or keyboard it would stop and ask for a ps2 input device.. lol
The last time I installed 98 on a machine without an optical drive I copied the Win98SE CD to a folder on the otherwise blank SD card serving as it’s hard drive. Interestingly the thin client I installed it on allowed me to boot from a USB floppy drive, so I cd’d to C:\Install & ran setup from there.
I have a USB IDE and a USB SATA drive bay that holds Optical drives. I also have a USB Sata that holds smaller, Laptop opticals which is neat as it's WAY smaller and lighter. A few years ago I bought my first case that made me choose between an full ATX board or an mATX and an optical drive so I went this route.
Awesome stuff! Please make a detailed video on installing MS DOS(version 6.22 preferably) and also on how to install any program on MS DOS operating system. For example legacy developer tools like Borland C/C++ and TurboC/C++ (version 1.0 or 2.0) are my favourites and I want to install them on MS DOS after installing MS DOS on a real or virtual machine or I can install Turbo C/C++ inside DosBox. Nowadays I can find Turbo C++ version 3.0 on the Internet but all of them are already installed inside DosBox and have a set up file by which I can easily install it on Windows Vista or later. While this is absolutely great work done by other developers who want to make it easy for us to install Turbo C/ C++ on Windows, I also want to know how to install them on original MS DOS operating system. If you can make detailed video on installing MS DOS(version 6.22) and installing any program like Turbo C/C++ on MS DOS, that would be of great help. Thanks again for this awesome content!
In the old DOS software was distributed on floppy disks. You inserted the first disk and looked for a command such as SETUP or INSTALL, or checked the manual. Then the installation commenced. I believe there is a video about how to install MS-DOS on the channel!
For installing Win98se, I use a custom boot disk to partition and format C: drive and copy the Win98 folder off the CD(still have actual drives). My custom boot floppy does have dos USB drivers, so would be able to copy data off a thumb drive. All of my retro computers still have working Floppy drives and DVD drives. I should try my USB Blu-ray drive on the ones with USB ports and my custom boot disk as the boot image.
My favorite method if the BIOS supports USB boot is the IODD ST400. It's a USB external HDD with a screen that lets you swap out images and emulates a CD drive, let's you mount ISO images directly and simultaneously presents itself as an HDD giving you space to copy files without touching a disc. Otherwise, I just install from discs.
Well, I do install 98 on two laptops (Not 100% literally tho.) - On the first one I use the CD/DVD Drive to copy the "Win98" folder on the disk (After when the Disk Partition and format thing were taken care of, that is.) And then I start the first installation phase there, but after that's finished I turn that laptop off, And I put that disk on the second laptop that's supposed to be on (Which either lacks CD/DVD Drive itself or doesn't even have the USB Boot support.) and I continue installing to the point it's installed.
It only needs 1 cable when using a USB 3.0 port because it delivers more power, but if using a USB 2.0, 1.1 or 1.0 port then you would need the second cable to provide power
Do I understand correctly? This is the video titled "How to install Windows 98 from USB CD/DVD Drive" but it doesn't cover how to do so? Instead of showing how to install windows 98 from optical drive you install floppy image from usb cd drive to be able to format hard drive and recommend to do some work around with windows 98 installation itself. I might didn't get something, otherwise the title is misleading.
I seem to remember a workaround to be able to get to the format command on the OEM disc - when you first boot the disc there are 3 choices -- one of them will just drop you down to a DOS prompt and that one will let you use 'format c:/' -- or maybe it was to let the installation fail and close and drop you to prompt? I just remember it's annoying as you need to reboot a couple times to get to it after using fdisk.
Hi Phil, its been a long time since your last video about Thin client PC. Would you considered to try install windows XP or older version of windows on intel cherry trail platform?!
Hey Phil i'm trying to build XP Overkill machine(After watch your i7 + gtx 960 video) but i can't install it. My motherboard is Z87I GAMING AC mini getting blue screen error when i try from CD. I think problem with AHCI drivers any advice to complete installation ?
One thing I’ve run into a LOT lately is dead drives in laptops. Nothing more infuriating than getting 90% through an install only to have it corrupt and crash due to a faulty drive. Might have to pick one of these up.
Trying to install windows 98 on a VIA EPIA CN13000 is proving to be a nightmare. System is running a 20gb IDE hardrive that i have managed to use a boot usb to run fdisk and format C: /s and copy sys but once the 2nd usb running freedos 98 is install it just wont load.
question: where you getting a bit carried a way "ORICO USB CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drive:, will it play Blu-ray, Amazon, not say much about Blu-ray play back, but Amazon not known for there Stella product research is it?
I always installed Win98 this way: Boot from the CD Fdisk then format MD Windows, CD Windows, MD Win98 xcopy * . * C:\Windows\Win98 Setup from there Windows will then detect a '' previous installation '' in C:\Windows, overwrite Then the installation will go on much faster since it's straight up from the hard drive, plus you'll have the whole CD content in \Windows\Win98. Also, many other techs that were more experienced then I was, back from the time I was a tech myself, told me that Win98 had a tendancy to be much more stable if it was installed this way (which I found to be true after a few months of testing both methods - this one and installing directly from the CD). Of course, it takes up more disk space, but it works like a charm. Much faster installation and much more stable. It's worth the lost disk space.
But how can you format? Format command isn't contained on the floppy boot image of the OEM Windows CD, it's in a folder on the CD, which you cannot access on a USB optical drive. Yes you're right, copying it onto the C: drive and then installing from there is also what I do and show in this video!
How I install 98 ? I build an older PC with an optical drive. Or I make a Rufus copy if the bios supports USB boot. Last, I would install DOS first then install the drivers needed for USB and/or Optical.
You can also use live linux which boots into ram so you will be able to remove bootable cd and insert win98 disc instead. Good example is Gparted. Which also have disc format and manage utility in it where you can very quickly format disc and create partitions and make them bootable etc. So no need for dos boot cd. But gparted is not very user friendly you will need to use console to mount discs and copy files. But I guess for some one going retro on DOS this should not be a problem. I mean, DOS is just a command console, that is it. Also some idea how to install win98 without cd or usb. You can start installation on virtual machine, then copy image bit by bit to actual hdd and insert it to machine. Then continue installation on real machine. Or you can install DOS somehow in virtual machine, copy win98 files to hdd and then boot DOS on real machine and start win98 setup from there. Windows XP is the same, as I wrote under some other video, it can be installed from DOS, but you will need smartdrv file from win98 cd. After that you can convert fat32 to ntfs from windows XP command prompt.
There was no USB CD-ROM drive 25 years ago when Windows 98 was out. And Windows boot-installation from internal CD-ROM (booting via a floppy image on CD) was first introduced in the time of Windows ME. Later in late 2000 the USB CD-ROM just showed up and USB CD driver was then provided for DOS. From that time there is a possibility for Windows 98 installation from USB CD drive. That could be done by making a bootable CD from a bootable DOS diskette loading USB CD driver. So speaking "... found a way 25 years later" is just like saying "found a 15 years old today boy who' had been lost for 25 years" 😄
floppy format cd images have been around for sometime now. it doesn't seem to be a new thing as all versions of ms-dos are on floppy cd images from 3.33 to 7.1 theirs also windows 95 and 98 boot floppy cd images and theirs one for windows ME too. i tried all of them with my internal ide cd drive only downside i had was with the laser needing to constantly read and move back and forth it got really warm and the drive started to malfunction..
@@philscomputerlab thanks for letting me know I didn't know that I'm still learning to use all the older operating systems I'm 28 I was born before Windows 95 was available but I grew watching my dad use them. I'm thinking of starting a retro channel soon just waiting for some more items to arrive
My method which I find reliable is: 1) Plug my HDD (via USB) or SD card in to my main PC, 2) Create a VM and mount the drive, 3) Partition and format it for Win98, make it bootable, 4) Shut down VM and copy the Win98 setup files from the ISO to the drive, 5) Install drive in retro pc and run setup
Every case I buy has optical drive spaces. I buy blu Rays and 4k Blu Rays due to the superior bit rate. I do have an external Blu Ray Writer back when it cost £32! How times have changed....
Hi Phil, I don't get the point... fdisk is on win98se cd, and format is available on this same cd on x:\win98\format It's been 8 years I'm using my HP usb dvd drive to install 98 on 2000s Era machines.
How can you access \win98 though? It's on the CD and you cannot access the CD because the CD-ROM driver doesn't support USB optical drives. I think you recall the process with an IDE optical drive?
Hi. What's your opinion on using FreeDos instead MS Dos for retro machines? Are there any downsides if I decide to use that? I'm thinking of restoring my old Pentium II based PC
I've done 2 videos testing FreeDOS vs MS-DOS and the compatibility is just not there. Why introduce another layer of issues to a hobby that's already tricky 😅
@@philscomputerlab How about DR-Dos? PTS-DOS? Novell-Dos. DR-Dos can handle Fat32, 8gb!!??? Just for fun because none of this is practical anyway. I'm still trying to figure out the finer points of multi-booting different DOS instances. Kinda tricky.
i've been using plop boot manqgwr for years and more recently i've been startung install process in a VM until before first boot and then cloning the virtual drive to real HW.
NOPE! I have Raon Everun UMPC and i installed W98 from a USB back in the day. It has AMD Geode2 that needs driver support to run at "full speed". Booting W98 took almost 5 minutes before the driver loaded. :DDD
Shoot my windows11 dvd wouldn’t boot off my usb drive on a brand new amd am5 mobo with the latest uefi update. Had to attach a sata drive. (Win11 dvd was $40 cheaper than digital or usb)
all my pc's can use usb in dos as long as the usb drive in bootable with dos 7.1 which i do with hpusbformat,i then just copy win95/96 to the drive i have a freedos sbemu one and a dos 7.1 sbemu one both with win98 on them...
IDE / SATA hard disk bay copy the win 98 file to the drive. run the installed from the drive ! of your ghost / HHD image for window98 just put it on the drive
Not sure where the CD device name "banana," came from, but I ran into a problem with this. The way DOS works, no file, regardless of extension, can have the same name as a device. This is why you can't create a file named CON.* in DOS. Many versions of Windows from ca. 2000 fail to install if the CD drive has banana as its device name because they can't copy the banana.ani animated cursor file. It would be a good idea to give this a new name. FWIW, I use OB1KNOB, and haven't run into any trouble. :)
I prefer to use windows millenium. To be able to use pendrives natively. And to use nGlide to emulate glide using an nvidia fx6200 card. Eu prefiro usar o windows millenium . Para poder usar os pendrivers de forma nativa. E para usar o nGlide para emular a glide usando uma placa nvidia fx6200 .
For me part of the fun of it all is doing it the way we used to. Theyre not retro machines to me, just the way I used to do it so I have no problem with remembering how I did it before the stupid generation who dont like to know what going on took over.
@@philscomputerlab Haha keeping it as my little secret extending my pxe lab with various oses since like 10 years. As long as you have a motherboard which can boot from network cards you can boot in even old p1s from them even if the original boards integrated only supports bootp or whatnot.
