Windows 98 install issue

Post by **Sparkfist** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:43 pm

Ok, stop the laughing.

I'm trying to get Windows 98SE installon on my Toshiba Satellie Pro 430cdt laptop. It's running 166MHz P1, 48MB ram, 2.2GB hard drive. I can get to the point that it probes the hardware and begins but then I get an error saying that Windows 98 needs something like 700MB hard disk space, which I have in ample supply, and is setup in DOS partitions and file system structure.

So what could I be doing wrong?

P.S. This ancient piece of technology is only booting from HDD or FDD.

Post by **gannon** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:45 pm

have you tried to fdisk the hard drive to check how it's setup and if large disk support is enabled, etc..?

Post by **Sparkfist** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 7:53 pm

gannon wrote:have you tried to fdisk the hard drive to check how it's setup and if large disk support is enabled, etc..?

Yeah I did that. I make the whole disk one big partition, set it as primary, and be default I believe any volume over two gigibytes needs to have large disk/file support enabled.

Post by **bicostp** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 8:17 pm

If you know who manufactured the hard drive, see if they offer a hard drive diagnostics boot floppy for that model. Maybe something's wrong with the hard drive itself (controller, perhaps?)

It wouldn't hurt to use the function that writes zeros to the entire drive, either.

gamer2 · Post by **gamer2** » Fri Nov 10, 2006 9:32 pm

format the HD, that may help.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat Nov 11, 2006 11:54 am

gamer2 wrote:format the HD, that may help.

Ironicly that's kind of what I needed. I got a 98 boot disk in there and looked under fdisk, turns out the partition was a "NON-DOS PARTITION", meaning it's likely something lke ext2/3. Well I fixed that, formated the thing and then finally got it started. It's copying the files to the hard drive right now.

Thanks for helping me pull my head out of by butt on this. Just couldn't figure out what was wrong and didn't bother to see that I missed someting.

bevo · Post by **bevo** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 1:48 pm

Its may of been FAT32 and the disk you used was old? As a guess.

Post by **bicostp** » Sun Nov 12, 2006 1:53 pm

98 works just fine on FAT32, in fact I think it had a tool that converted FAT16 drives to FAT32.

98 doesn't like ext2, ext3, NTFS, HFS, HFS+, or MFS drives.

(Linux, NT, and Mac OS partitions)