Posted on 03/30/2008 5:26:01 AM PDT by 50sDad
Anybody...I have a donated PC I am making inmto an arcade machine, and it has somebody's old XP setup on it.
.45 to the hard-drive, IIRC.
Dig up your old Win95 boot floppy and use the FDisk command. Erase everything on the hard drive and start from scratch.
(That was my first thought, too)
These days, you're lucky if a floppy disk lasts 6 months.
I'd be absolutely shocked if a floppy from the mid-1990's still worked.
Recently I went through some of my old floppies [many of them commercially released] from roughly the 1996-1998 timeframe, and none of them were readable.
If you want to make a bootable floppy nowadays, then you'd probably need to investigate something like FreeDOS.
Isn’t Win98SE the worst POS, right after Win95 and v3.1? Why would anyone even use it?
If the hard drive is formatted for NTFS file system (the norm for XP), you will probably need to reformat the hard drive to get the FAT system used by Win98. I’m not sure of the issues here, but you need to look at this.
It was my experience over the years that if you didn’t start off with a really “clean” partition table and mbr that you would have problems later on, especially if you were trying to go from NTFS (or HPFS) to FAT or FAT32. Just fdisk-ing and formatting the drive doesn’t take care of this issue. There are 2 ways to do this. The first is the simplest: Go to www.killdisk.com and get their free disk erase utility. You can download it as either a bootable floppy image or a bootable CD image. This could take a while to run. Or, if you have a bootable floppy with the debug utility on it, you could run this script. CAUTION!!!! THIS SCRIPT WILL WIPE YOUR DISK. THOUGH YOUR DATA CAN BE RECOVERED, IT WON’T BE PARTICULARLY EASY NOR CHEAP TO DO SO!!!!!!
F 200 L200 0
A 100
MOV AX,301
MOV BX,200
MOV CX,1
MOV DX,0080
INT 13
INT 3
G=100
Q
(reboot the computer at this point)
You must boot to DOS (or command prompt Win9x) for this to work. And it must be the primary DOS accessible drive (C:).
Mark
You should get an option for FAT32 formatting when you install 98SE. Do that.
If it doesn’t specify the disk format, just use the “format entire disk” option.
You want FAT32, not NTFS.
Also, keep in mind that Windows 98 has issues with hard drives larger than 137gb. (48-bit LBA and Windows 98, 98 SE, Me.)
You can download a Windows 98 bootdisk from Bootdisk.com.
That wasn't fixed until XP SP2, IIRC.
Windows 98 SE was the better of the many consumer versions of Windows in the '90s. Well, it was a lot better than the second or third releases of Windows 95 or, God help us all, Windows Me.
You really want to downgrade from the decent XP to the hideous 98? Why?
Technically 98 is the second-worst. Top honors go to WinME. Holy cat, I still have nightmares about that POS.
Aefdisk (shareware) is better. Find a floppy and use it. If I remember correctly, you need to reset the MBR (master boot record) to get rid of the NT Boot Loader. (Other FReepers, correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I've done this.) Alternatively, use a GNU/Linux install disc to repartition the hard disk.
XP keeps very careful track of whom I am and what is done with it. Win98SE is so far on the trailing edge that I can install it on an old computer that is expected to do nothing more than be a MAME arcade cabinet....it runs perfectly, and demands no allegiance.
Aefdisk (shareware) is better. Find a floppy and use it. If I remember correctly, you need to reset the MBR (master boot record) to get rid of the NT Boot Loader. (Other FReepers, correct me if I'm wrong. It's been a while since I've done this.) Alternatively, use a GNU/Linux install disc to repartition the hard disk.
I can't speak to the question as to whether aefdisk will work or not. It's not just resetting the mbr (fdisk /mbr will do that from a Win9x boot floppy). According to a MS developer that I once worked with, you need to get rid of the entire MBR and boot sector, as well as completely destroying the partition table, not just clear or reset them. This was also the only way to take care of a boot sector virus. One of the problems with just using a MS FDISK program is that it doesn't actually destroy the partition table: It simply clears the contents. You really want to restore the disk to a pristine state (at least as far an an OS installation is concerned), looking like a brand new, empty hard drive.
As I mentioned before, a good way to do this is through the use of "Kill Disk," available from from www.killdisk.com. It will take a while to run, whereas the debug script is finished as soon as you reboot the computer. It's simple to use. Just save the commands to a file, and then at the command prompt, simply type:
debug < filename
After rebooting the computer, you'll have a blank hard drive, at least as far as an OS goes.
I'm not sure if the Linux utilities will take care of this or not.
Mark
You’re getting some serious overkill advice here. Just reformat it to FAT32 and install 98SE.
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