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.
There was a guide in tomshardware about slipstreaming service packs on your Windows XP CD one of the things he did was explaining how to extract the bootable img from the boot loader and insert this into your new iso. www.tomshardware.co.uk/installing-windowsxp-and,review-1052-6.html
To boot with a retail back in the day, you would need a Windows 98 boot floppy. This, today, you can slipstream right into the retail ISO in the form of a bootable 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!
Yup! You can also copy (extract) the Windows files onto the E2B, then access those files from FreeDOS. This was an option I considered, but thought this one is neater. But yea, it's a top alternative.
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!!
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.
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 ;-)
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!
@@philscomputerlab it boot from stock windows CD via USB but then didn’t have the USB drivers to read once it took over. Then had a weird problem where format was failing on the internal flash. Rufus worked for Freedos but no sound support on the stock T5720. Anyway moved to win98 gotta test some dos games now.
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.
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).
Yes you can rise the limit to like ~1024mb (a bit more, I don't remember the right number) editing the system.ini (for windows) and system.cb (for safe mode) and adding the line "MaxPhysPage=40000" down to the [386Enh] section (in system.cb you have to write [386Enh] then go to the line and type MaxPhysPage40000). The last time I did that was when I tried with an i7 1st gen platform with 6gb of ram and it worked flawlessly :)
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
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.
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.
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.
Yea there are lots of other options. As I work with open test benches, I boot from a custom Windows 98 SE Boot Floppy, partition, format and make the HDD bootable. Then I unplug it, hook it it up to my desktop and copy Windows 98 files, drivers, games, benchmarks, everything across. Then put it back, install Windows and everything else. I do this a LOT with all my projects :D
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!
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
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!
I don't work with old notebooks, but that machine has USB ports, so you could just use a flash drive for your drivers, rather than CD-ROM? All you need is the USB storage driver for Windows 98. You should also be able to use networking, although with the latest Windows 10 updates this isn't working as well as before.
Oh sorry mate, that was a poor choice of words on my behalf. I use a USB CD Drive to boot and install Windows (boot spanish bootable windows version, install english non boot-able windows version). With this video you saved me that hassle. The problem with the drivers has something to do with the chipset/IRQ/ and no official support from Lenovo; Even though this is IBM, and they have the drivers and utilities for even older machines, for some reason not for this one. So I rely DriverGuide dot com for the drivers. To transfer files I do use a USB Drive. And if I need something, I always can boot Puppy Linux though a USB Drive and surf the web just fine with wifi (even youtube works!). Maybe (just a theory) my problem comes from the amount of RAM (1.5GB). After installing Windows, and after the last reboot, I have to boot linux and edit the "SYSTEM.INI" file inside the Windows folder, and limit the amount of RAM that Windows can use to 1GB (MaxPhysPage=40000) or 512 (MaxPhysPage=20000). Cheers and thanks for the reply!
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 ?
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 :)
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
I'm working on a new method. 2 steps. W98 SE Boot Floppy (but with USB flash drive) to partition, format and make HDD bootable. Second step use Linux, Windows XP liveCD or FreeDOS to copy Windows 98 setup files, drivers and everything else you need across.
@@philscomputerlab sounds gr8, I only have SATA drives at the moment so just being able to install Win 98 without an IDE drive has been really useful 👍
It took long for me to figure this out: You need to use a bootable Windows 98 image (so an OEM image). With retail images this does not work. You can get those images on WinWorld
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!
Yea there are other methods, and I've managed to build myself something that works even better, but the steps involved to build it are more complex. I found this the "easiest" in terms of sharing it with others and doing minimal manual stuff.
> I've Even then without the optical drive, you could potentially use a smaller case for the 98 PC, or remove it entirely if you know how to transfer the files of the CDs you'll use, from another computer.
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?
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.
I know this is old but after troubleshooting this error for a while I realized that Windows 98 didn't support the 4 gb of memory that was installed in the system I was installing on. I removed all but 1 gb and the install completed.
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.
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!
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.
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?
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
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
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?