How I reinstall Windows 98 on my old machines
This is one of those things that might be useful to someone out there so:
This is how I, personally, reinstall Windows 98 on my retro boxes. I should note a few things:
- I am doing this on machines with USB. Substitute accordingly to your machine's capabilities.
- I'm also doing this on machines that are pretty minmaxed, ones that probably shouldn't run 98 but do because I'm absolutely nuts (like running 98 on very much XP machines).
- I also have network cards in my machines.
- I also use SATA SSDs for this.
Let's begin:
1. Prep the drive
If you're using something small and not comically large like me, you can probably skip all this and just use fdisk and format. I usually run 128GB SSDs and fdisk tends to lose it on drives larger than 32GB, so I opt to prep the drive in another OS entirely.
Do not, and I repeat, DO NOT use gparted for this; for some reason 98 does not like whatever gparted does to the drive.
My weapon of choice here is a tool called guiformat by Ridgecrop There are other sites that come up when you google "guiformat" and they don't look trustworthy, the one hosted by Ridgecrop (despite them not using HTTPS) is the real deal. This will run from Windows XP all the way up to 11.
What I usually like to do here is do this in situ by combining it with another tool, Hiren's BootCD. Hiren's contains a live WinXP environment that you can use to run apps. I start it on the system that's getting 98, and stick guiformat on a flash drive (or on my NAS if Hiren's has the drivers for networking). At this point you can point guiformat at the drive that's supposed to get 98, let it run, and your drive is fat32 formatted and ready for 98.
You may also need to invoke diskpart to clean the drive if it's GPT-formatted (as Win98 wants MBR formatting). This is also why I like to do this on XP on the system destined for 98; I've had Win11 just assume I want an SSD formatted as GPT which will trip up older systems.
You can "clean" the drive in XP by going to an administrator-privileged command prompt and typing "diskpart". Once you're in, type "list disk", find your drive (make sure the capacities match), type "select disk x" (where x is the drive ID in the list), and then type "clean". diskpart should report success, and you'll have to restart the computer. Upon restarting (and getting back into XP), open Disk Management, and it should offer to initialize the drive.
Make sure it's set to MBR, and it'll probably force you to format it as NTFS. Let it do so. Once done, fire up guiformat and let it rip on the freshly formatted drive and you're ready for the next part.
2. Copy the 98 disc to the drive
Pop the Hiren's BootCD out of the drive (don't worry, it's okay) if you're doing this in situ, and pop the 98 disc in. If you're doing this on an external machine, either pop your 98 disc in, or crack open the .iso. Your choice.
What you want is to copy the Win98 folder on the root of the disc in its entirety to the drive you just prepped. Whichever way you go about this, just make sure you have a Win98 folder on the root of your prepped drive with all the contents from the Win98 folder on the disc.
Warning! If you're running this on a system with more than 512MB of RAM, make sure you grab Rudolph Loew's PATCHMEM (RIP) and stick it on the root of your Win98 drive, as well. You'll need it later.
Make sure you have some means of booting into DOS. This can be your Win98 disc, it can be a Win98 boot floppy, whatever you've got. Just some way to get into DOS. Make sure you have it ready. Restart the computer.
3. Installing 98