Installing Win98SE on unbootable USB Drive

[zabadoh]

The Plan:
What I want is to run Win98SE without a hard drive on this relatively old mobo that doesn't support booting off a USB drive.

I was planning on getting around that by booting off a floppy that has USB drivers for DOS.

The Story so Far:
I've made a floppy that loads CDROM and a USB driver that installs the USB drive as C:

I've run the Win98 installation, and everything goes swimmingly until the first restart, before hardware setup, etc.

If I leave the floppy in, then the machine just reboots to MS-DOS where I have it right now.

If I take the floppy out and boot off the Win98SE CD, the driver for the USB drive never loads and Win98's setup can't find the USB drive.

The BIG Question
How can I get Win98's setup program to finish the installation after the reboot?

I've thought that there might be a way to add my drivers to the standard boot disk image that's somewhere on the CD, but I can't find that image.

[zabadoh]

Originally Posted by oldtimer

You have to be kidding,The cd is just files to be extracted to a
Hard Drive.

Nope, not kidding.

I am talking about the first restart that the Win98 Setup makes you go through after it's copied butt loads of files from the CD. "Please remove all floppy disks and reboot your machine" or something like that with a 30 second countdown to an automatic reboot. Normally, the CD stays in the drive and the workstation will boot off that during this restart and continue with detecting hardware, making the registry, etc.

I can copy the CD to my 2GB thumb drive, but where would I go from there?

I can't boot off the thumb drive because the stupid !@#$ BIOS lacks a setting for booting off USB. I need the driver that's currently on my floppy.

If I boot off my floppy, then running setup on the CD from a DOS prompt doesn't do much except run through the entire setup process that I just went through.

If I boot off the CD, the drivers on the floppy aren't loaded, and setup just goes "Huh?" because it can't find the thumb drive because the drivers that are on the floppy and not on the CD haven't been loaded.

[TopFarmer]

Do not know if it will work at this stage of install or with a USB device ,bit can try , copy MSDOS.SYS from the USB drive to the floppy.

[zabadoh]

Ah, you mean Method 2 on this page.

That did help somewhat.

I've changed my strategy towards this problem: I removed the USB drive and installed to one of my backup HDs. That went flawlessly.

I then plugged both the HD and the USB drive into a second PC, and copied the installation to the USB drive.

Then I followed your advice, and the KB article above, and copied the MSDOS.SYS file from the USB drive to the floppy. In retrospect, I probably could have copied the original MSDOS.SYS file that was on the USB drive when I installed there, but that's in the past.

Now I'm getting the Win98 splash screen, but now have the following error:

"While initializing device IOS:
Error: An I/O subsystem driver failed to load.
Either a file in the .\iosubsys directory is corrupt,
or the system is low on memory."

to which I reply "Keep on hackin'"

[TopFarmer]

Reading MS article
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/225497/en-us
leads me to guess your USB drivers are likely being loaded into low memory, make them load into hi memory might solve problem.

Might take a look at this article on running 98 from CD, might give you an idea. http://www.lachiesadicristo.it/w98cd/page1.htm

{to which I reply "Keep on hackin" } Happy learning.

[Locoster]

I am no right on top of this yet, but I believe there are versions of Linux that would do what you are trying to do. Linux programs are available without cost. Just google 'Kubuntu' or 'ubuntu' to get free downloads or discs by mail, on a donation basis. I am going to my first Linux users meeting tomorrow, and hope to find out if this will work for me.