IBM Thinkpad 98 reinstall?

Soldato
Joined
5 Mar 2004
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Southport
Does Win 98 require a bootdisk for installation? I have a thinkpad here with major problems and need to reinstall 98, however it has no floppy drive. Can it be done?

sorry, I'm an XP only man :)
 
i assume if you can boot into 98 then you can use the 98 cd. I have always booted 98 from a cd, my friend made me a cd with a 98 boot disk on it years ago. Once booted into the dos like mode i change the cds over and execute it from there.

Im sure you could find a 98 boot cd on google
 
No, Win98 CDs are not bootable ;)
Thats a common myth.

The quick & dirty way to do it is to find any one of the system rescue CDs that are floating around the net. Use this to format the HDD, & install DOS, then copy across the contents of the 98 CD and install from the HDD. Its also possible to build a CD that'll boot DOS, which you can then use to load the 98 installer directly from the CD, but thats a little more work. (IMHO anyway :p )

-Leezer-
 
Windows 98 Second edition CD's are Bootable, don't know about original 98 though.
 
J.T said:
Windows 98 Second edition CD's are Bootable, don't know about original 98 though.

Rot ;)
Got two here, one retail & one OEM (Although, as far as I'm aware there is absolutely no difference), and both are decidably non-bootable.
I haven't tried an upgrade disk (Did they even exist?), but I'd assume there would be no difference again.

-Leezer-
 
Very odd :confused:
My OEM CD came with an ancient Panrix (Anyone remember them :p ) machine, would have been very soon after the introduction of SE. The retail version isn't much newer than that, although I'm not sure by how much (Came out of a junk shop), but its very decidedly non-bootable.

With both of them, there was a floppy (Lost long ago!), which needed to be booted from, which AFAIK booted DOS & loaded the CD drivers, before presenting you with a command prompt, from which you were supposed to load the CD.

-Leezer-
 
BigBoy said:
I have both 98 and 98se sat on my desk and both are bootable.!

Thanks for confirming that Bigboy, I thought I may have been wrong so stuck a 98 CD into my CD drive and rebooted my PC and sure enough it booted off the 98 CD, no floppy required :)
 
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