Install Windows 98 from USB Flash Drive with Easy2Boot 

I hardly ever comment anything, but just by presenting the situation I ended up seeing the whole video - something that I never really do because I am experienced with computers for many years - yet, you showed me something: I was wrong. There is other ways to do stuff. Great video, great explanation, simple, objective, clear and resolutive. Thank you.

Thanks for the video, Phil. I've been battling for weeks trying to setup a Panasonic Toughbook with W98 to use for programming 2-way radios and this looks like it's been successful.

Maybe you should pin this as it might be helpful for many users who get errors (for example error 13): It is crucial to use a BOOTABLE Windows 98 SE Image. I say this because only OEM ISOs for Windows 98 are bootable, not the usual Retail image.

Best method to install Windows 98 from the USB! Worked like a charm for me and yeah, having the win98 files on the hard drive at all times in the winsetup folder makes things so much easier when installing drivers. Thanks a million!

Phil the windows NT 'error' when installing 98se is because the USB is still installed and it's formatted as ntfs by the easy2boot utility. Setup detects it and warns you but as you're installing to c: it dosen't cause any issues on startup.

Tip: if you first boot to E2B - DOS menu and run the FreeDOS Floppy entry, you can very quickly run FDISK to format the internal HDD and then reboot to the Win98 ISO. The FreeDOS FDISK is also less buggy!

I'll spare you the details, but Phil, this tutorial kept me sane after hours of trying to boot the w98 install via USB in god knows how many other ways (main PC hasn't had an optical drive in a decade). Thanks so much man, my retro gaming build is actually making proper progress now. Installing System Shock 2 as we speak, very excited!

*PLEASE PIN THIS COMMENT TO HELP OTHERS* For everyone having ERROR 13 it's very important to have a BOOTABLE ISO and to edit the ISO straight from UltraISO and NOT extracing then remaking an ISO !! I was scratching my head then I followed the instructions in the video and my problem was solved !! Hope this helps others having the same issue

this tutorial gives me real good information to install win98 to a thin client. I'm replacing a Compaq Prolinea 5100 with a HP T5740, and it needs to run windows 98 se in order to run a cattle feeding DOS programm correctly. This is perfect!!

Yay! I've been waiting for this!

i really needed this video 3 weeks ago. spent days trying this - unsuccessfully. in the end i restored a 14 year old disk image of my win 98 pc back in the day. that worked on the first try.

Thank you so much. You saved METU physics department's life

Phil. The master piece is install it from and on a USB stick😀 and run it from the stick on a new PC👌

I have also done a very similar installation using easy2boot; my retrocomputer have an optical drive but I didn't want to burn a disc that probably I'll use only once, and I also wanted to experiment a little ;-)

G'day from Melbourne fellow Aussie

This tutorial is awesome! Now I have Windows 98 in 2018! :-)

Thank you so much it works on my retro Samsung laptop now :)

Thank you so much. Helped me a lot. My specs: Pentium 4 2.0Ghz 512mb (mainboard gigabyte ga-85648fx) with MX4000

Thank You, Phil, it works perfectly ! Great job! Now my retro PC have a WIN98 :)

WOW. Well done Phil. This guide really helps after two of effort and failure.

That's awesome. When i tried this it didn't work but XP and 2000 did.

Thank u so much! I did it on a acer aspire one! For avoid memory issues during install, I put a 512MB memory module! It took some time to finish the windows installation, and this was expected due to the netbook specs, making me remenber those old times installing windows 98 on old machines!

Thanks for the great tutorial. I wish I could've liked it twice. Once it's not enough

Had massive dramas on a HP T5720 using various tools like Rufus, USB CDRom booting etc.. and this worked perfectly.. Cheers Phil

this was the only mothod i had a proper instalation. great job and this is the one!

Thanks, this came in very useful as I went and formatted the cf card that a mini pc used as hard drive and the pc doesn't have any floppy or cd rom drives at all. Running win 98SE now. My original plan was to run win95 but I guess this'll do. It had windows 3.11 installed when I got it.

Thank you, works perfectly. Now if only the target machine was enthusiastic about running Windows 98... lol

Great! A really good job with this tutorial. Greetings from Argentina!

Something to look into: While the conventional wisdom was that Win98 had a 512mb RAM limit, I found that on systems of the era with =four= RAM slots, it had no trouble using 1GB of RAM, with no patches, drivers, or errors. Had something to do with memory addressing, which was straightforward with four slots but required some sort of complicated leapfrogging with 3 slots (like it was two sets of overlapped pairs).

Thank you my man, I tried this for hours on my own and finally got it working thanks to this video

Installing win 98 TO usb is a pretty fun challenge too, i had it running a couple of weeks back on a xp era pc, which might have made it easier due to native motherboard usb support

Another quality video from Phil.

oh man so much thanks!, i was trying like 3 or 4 weeks to install any windows on my compaq armada m300 thats without cd or floppy drive, and finally i have a win98 on it

Wow I know I am late to the game, but after days of trying seeing windows 98 boot up was amazing. Of course, now my USB mouse is acting like a spaz with windows 98, back to searching. great video.

woooow perfect, soon i will be doing my retro pc and thanks to You i have my Win98 on USB ready to go! Thank U

Thank you, it helped me a lot!

You are a savior sir thank you i was able to save my windows 98 system that lost it's optical drive

At 9:57 what Win98 is saying is that it detected an NTFS file system loaded somewhere (flash drive, unseen partition, virtual RAMdrive, etc), and those files won't be accessible when using Win98, because it didn't have NTFS support. Only NT workstation and Win2000 and on had native NTFS support. You're correct in saying that it doesn't affect the install. I'm using this method to install Win98 on a system I've tried installing XP on for forever, and can't get it to do. So I'm using 98 to bridge to XP setup. Thanks for the guide!

PhilsComputerLab the reason you're getting that Windows NT message is because you're using a (likely newer) SATA HDD that has a larger default cluster size. When Win98 setup sees that it identifies it as a WinNT drive.

I have found that installing the fast Grub4dos USB 2.0 driver in the easy2boot utilities menu can speed things up a fair bit. Also something worth doing if you are doing the XP from USB install as I found some boards will run at usb 1 speeds if not slower, great for if you are chilling watching tv or something, but painful if you are just wanting to get it done.

I just wanted to say thank you so much for your vids and info and your site

You definitely have one amazed subscriber more from now 😊 Yey 😂 now I have the "not enough ram" thing going on 😑 is there any ddr3 512 out there? 😂

where are the usb drivers

One of the easiest method I've found if you can boot into Linux on the machine is to do the following. Use gparted to format the drive as fat32. Copy the contents of the ISO/CD to the hard drive into a folder named winsetup. Restart the computer and boot from floppy drive/win98 CD into dos6.22, or whatever method is easiest for you to run the setup from dos. Then CD into the winsetup folder on the C: drive. Then run setup, the setup application automatically sets the drive as active and writes the correct mbr to make the drive bootable, and once it's finished you can remove the dos boot drive and continue finishing the setup from there. Using this method will allow you to add all the drivers and utilities with Linux to the C: drive into a folder to save time as well, and because the drive is already formatted, you don't need to wait for fdisk to verify the drive, and most importantly, it can be done on machines with limited RAM capacity. I use a similar method to this on an old laptop that doesn't have a working floppy drive, and can't boot from USB, that also has a finicky CD drive that can boot my windows setup disc, but fails to read it when running format, setup or even fdisk off the CD and only has 64MB of RAM, of which only 56MB is available due to the video chip taking 8MB of it.

Thanks to the tutorial, i managed to get further in the Win98 setup on Skylake hardware! Sadley, lots of general protection faults love to crash the installer. Still figuring out a way tho!

"This is fairly quick cause we have a SATA..." Meanwhile i'm waiting here for it to finish for about an hour 😂😂

Wow...you really know your stuff...you made it look easy..ill have to watch this video several times to get it right

Very good. I did have to slow to .5 SPEED to keep up though. You seem to be so knowledgeable, wondering if you might have an idea why I am havinf trouble instaalling drivers for Windows 95 snd Windows 98. Regular install, not USB. Thanks in advance.

This worked with windows ME, I'm clearly nuts if I want to use ME, but I love the challenge. Worked fine on a socket 478 with both sata and IDE, and with a USB mouse and keyboard. Just beware of the ME ISO's as they come with SBSI (step by step instructions) and they're loads of videos that you need to remove from your ISO

Hey bud thanks for the video! How did you record the other computer screen?

Thank you for this. This helped me tremendously

Been trying to install Windows 98 on a Thinkpad X40 using a SD2CF adapter. It does works, and the speed of the SD is awesome! But the drivers have been a huge pain, and I got tired of using an external USB CD Drive and reinstalling and swaping disc (I use a spanish windows 98 disc to boot, and then another disc with windows 98 in english). This way is less painful! I should make a disk image after installing Windows 98, but each time I say to myself "That's too much hassle, it will probably work fine" and it doesn't. Anyhow, great video mate!

Thanks, Phil. This is when the fun begins.

So, is that teaser.jpg on the desktop an actual teaser or did you just name it that? Cause I'd love to see some more Pentium 4 goodness.

hey everybody , i got a problem , after install the hole system , i got a message that i got unsuficient memory ( i got 1 gb , ddr3 ) and i stuck there with only the restart option that always lead me to this screen over and over , i heard that i need to change something in system.ini but how do i access this if i can't even continue with the installation thanks to the memory issue ?

Nice video ! When you made that, did you set in the BIOS SATA drives as IDE/Legacy or leave it in AHCI mode (if there's the option of course) ?

Thanks uncle Phil.

am about to build a pentium 4 as its something I didn't do as a kid so its a sentimental thing, I don't want to waste money of a cd rom drive so usb install will be perfect thank you :)

Thanks man,, helped a lot.

Thanks, great useful video!

9:10 the bit where you make the WINSETUP directory and copy all the files over that's got to be one of the most important steps, I'm trying to include all the drivers I need for my motherboard I just need to trim all the folder names

Thank you soooooo much!!! It worked perfectly!

This really save my life, I don't have the boot floppy so I didn't know what I gonna do

Very Handy, Thanks Phil

i get error 13: invalid or unsupported executable format, how could i fix that?

I have a 512 MB USB stick that has Win98 DOS on it and the cab files. As I recall, the hard part was getting it bootable. HP used to have a tool for making USB flash drives bootable. But I boot to it, format the disk, reboot? I can't remember, but then SYS the c: drive and copy over the CABs. Then you can reboot without the USB drive and proceed with installation. I also use gdisk, the old format tool that came with Ghost. I keep that on the stick too. Fun times!

you are the best one thanks alot

Thank you for video. It work, but it very slow! I`m installed WIndows 98 on PC with broken CD-ROM.

at the moment my pc is without os, i'm unable to access boot menu somehow and i'm able to access only bios. but there is still another problem, my bios doesn't recognize my usb flashdrive as a bootable option. how do i make my flashdrive visible?

THANK VERY MUCH!!! eres el mejor!!! Gracias!! Eres grande! God job! Like and sub! :)

That does NOT work anymore in some scenarios with the latest version of Easy2boot. This is failing with a grub error after win98 goes into the virtual drive. For other OS, WinSetup is way better than this tool.

got an error at the end part of setup were you reboot again after the visual windows 98 setup and when it trys to load the rest of the setup after reboot it flashes windows 98 load screen then says Insufficient memory to initialize Window.

My usb volume label is E2B and when I type it in it always is wrong

I went throught the whole process, and Win 98 SE has been installed successfully. Problem is the usb still doesn't work on my laptop (Thinkpad X32) even after installing that nusb36e.exe. And because this laptop has no floppy or cd/DVD drive, I have no way of putting any data or program on it. What am I missing? As a side note I want to mention that I installed the Hungarian version of Win 98 SE, and during installation of this nusb36e it said that this version works with English version of Win 98 SE only. Could that be a problem? I don't see how the language of the OS could affect something like USB handling by a driver? EDIT: nevermind, it works perfect now. Not sure what was wrong the first time. As a side not, when you mention to restart the computer, on a laptop you need to press CTRL+ALT+DEL to do that.

holy shit! I was able to install win98 on thinkpad t430 with this guide

Hey Phil, I'm currently building a Dual 1.4GHz Tualatin box with the Gigabyte GA-6VTXD motherboard. It uses the Via Apollo Pro 133T chipset. At first I got ~1GB/s memory bandwidth on Everest (which is normal for 1.4GHZ Tualatins) then I formated the HD because it was being used with my Asus TUV4X and I wanted a clean install, but now I can only get ~360Mb/s both on Windows XP and 98. My Asus TUV4X also behaves the same (that's why I switched to the Gigabyte). I tried a bunch of memory sticks, all of them PC133. Tried tweaking the BIOSes, memory timings etc. and installed all of the VIA 4 in 1 drivers but with no luck. Any ideas on what's happening? Cheers, mate!

Help. I am a bit late but Easy2Boot app is not opening AT ALL.

you forgot the usb driver link

Can you do a Tutorial for Windows 95? I assume it's the same logic, just minor difference.

Bro, you did not include A SINGLE LINK in the description, not for the iso and not for the usb driver. wth?

I cant find the "c:", please help

Hi, I am trying to bring an old Acer One Series back to life to use it to bring in turn a Sony photo printer back to life. (No drivers available for any modern OS.) When I follow your excellent tutorial just before Windows 98 SE is supposed to work I get a pesky message informing me: "Insufficient memory to initialize Windows. Quit one or more memory-resident programs or remove unnecessary utilities from your CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files., and restart your computer. Press any key to continue...." As my laptop has 1024 Mbytes of memory, memory cannot be the problem. Any ideas what's going on? I checked the CONFIG.SYS file, but it's contentes don't seem to be anything that might be hogging memory space to any extent. Any idea what's going on here? I should point out that everything else went perfectly until this last for the moment insurmountable hurdle.

Question: Yeah its 2020 but: HOW did you record your retro PC? Which cable or adapter do you use? Which capturecard and so on :-) THX !!!

CAN YOU MAKE AN UPDATED TUTORIAL PLEASE ON VERSION 2.x

I have a problem, when I got to the setup, it detected an error file [.cab] and setup cannot continue, I tried to change the iso file 3 times and the error still appear, how can I fix this?

Hi, I have problem while installing windows, it can't be installed on my drive (C:) but on D: which is partition of the flash drive, also scandisk have some problems with C:

Thanks for the video, I’m assuming this won’t work in my case though as I’m trying to get Windows 98 installed on a retro PC which only has 32 MB of RAM!

Can I use this to make a custom W98 SE OS, with the RAM patch or even the unofficial patch 3, and then install it directly on a modern PC with 4GB of RAM?

how long does the "Getting ready to run Windows for the first time" screen last? How do you know if its stuck?

What type of hard drive do you have? This is insanely fast! I was waiting for over half an hour to format my 120GB SATA2 drive!

easytoboot won't detect any of my usb drives, any ideas? reboot fixed it.

works great !!! thank you

I followed all the steps perfectly up to 9:50 and now it's stuck on "Copying files needed for Windows Setup...". It never makes it to the Setup GUI. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated! @PhilsComputerLab

Lovely, lovely stuff.

For those who get error 13. Open and modify the original win98 iso on ultraiso. Do not create a new iso. Its not bootable.

Hey my setup went straight to the easy2boot menu, what do I do? I copied the files over and it worked until the file transfer was done. I brought me back to the menu. Pls tell me what to do

Thank you very much for this video. Ha sido de gran ayuda para realizar tareas de test en mi trabajo. Gracias de nuevo

my only problem with this video is you deleted the drivers folder witch is used to install video cards, sound cards, and all the other little things that require that driver folder and was wondering how the heck is windows supposed to work without all those driver .inf files?

I get setup (.cab) file error during win98se install.

Thanks i am installing on my modern laptop