I'd like to start by saying I think windows 98 was designed to boot on its on into msdos mode. How many people with windows 98 can get the disk to boot into msdos without a bootdisk. I know I can.. Can anyone else verify this.. Jamzwayne, Clonetek, or anyone else...

 

Who is still running Win98?

 

Tons of people. Heck I kinda wish i'd have stuck with 97 sometimes.

 

You have a copy of Windows 97? My PC absolutely supports booting to CD, I used that to load XP and Linux. You still haven't said where your CD came from. I'd be very interested to see the directory listing....

 

97? I must have missed that one.

Btw, I always used a floppy boot disk but you can make a bootable CD. I don't think I've even seen a system running 98 in at least 2 years. Guess I'm spoiled on XP.

 

I administer about 20 Win 98 machines and 30 Win 2K machines. Anyway, I went out to one of the 98 machines and had no problem getting it into DOS prompt without a disk.

 

Booting to the 98 CD or just booting 98 to a DOS prompt?

 

Far from a computer tech, but I still run Windows 98 on my home PC.

The '98 start menu absolutely offers a 'Restart in Dos' option. No CD required to get a DOS prompt.

I think (not sure about this though, and not at home to check) that holding F8 while booting will give you a choice to go to DOS.

 

Well I can do either without any problems

 

Invalid, Maybe I'm not understanding what it is we are trying to prove. Your question asks if people can boot 98 to a DOS prompt, I thought we were trying to see if the Windows 98 CD is bootable (Slamma has no OS on his PC, someone did a format /s). Everyone with 98 should be able to boot to, or exit to a DOS prompt, or there is something wrong, but there are no cdrom drivers at this point. With a blank drive, you would need to sys it and load real mode drivers, or boot to CD/Floppy.

 

Windows 95 came in three different version...
95a which came out late 1994 didn't support usb. It was on floppy disk.
95b was the next version
95c was final version and was released in 1997. Windows 97 supported usb. Thats why I call it windows 97. This has nothing to do with going from windows to dos. I wanna know how many people are able to boot directly off the windows 98 cd after post to msdos. Rather than going to windows or hitting f8 and going to dos. Urban cowboy makes two. The reason I made the thread was to get this out as a seperate topic so more people would see it.

 

You can boot off of a Win98 SE CD for sure. I don't remember, but believe all previous versions, the CD was not bootable.....not sure, though.

You did have the option to create what they called an "emergency start-up disk" which we all call a "98 boot disk" ..... very popular because you could boot off this floppy and have CD-ROM support.

EDIT: SE = Second Edition...this came out about a year after the original Win98

 

This site shows screen-shots from booting off of a Win98SE disk....again, I think only the SE version is bootable

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/win9...exfullpage.htm

 

I've never been able to boot off my non OEM 98SE disk with a freshly formated hard drive. Yea I can boot to CD after windows or any OS has been installed but not with a clean slate on the hard drive. Although I can boot off a Compaq Quick Restore OEM disk on a clean hard drive.... As far as I know you can only boot to CD with a freshly formatted machine with either an OEM of 98 or newer disk, or any 2000 Pro or newer disk.
There are programs that you can download to make a Bootable 98SE CD ussally makes the CD a 98SE Plus then. (big plus... LOL) I've never used any of them so I don't know if they make it both a bootable CD and an install CD too or not.

Lets think back to the reliability of 98, it was some what stable IF everything went right. BUT if it didn't then you spent hours trying to find that one file that didn't quit seem to get transfered during the install for some unkown reason. Then for an even stranger reason 98 didn't setect that it had missed that file(s) either. Then secondly the file system simply sucked. Would you really want this file system loading it's self? Or would you rather Oaks Technology to prepare you system for the load before that file system was installed? Loading in it's self was a big task to ask 98 to do back then. Much less asking it to boot the system then load itself. I wouldn't trust that install to last more than 6 months if that before troubles occured.

 

Let me think... What did I do with customers that had internet connection problems while running win 95/98...


Oh yeah, dump them back in the queue.

LOL


Looks like you got some good answers.



ps: win95/98/ME is the devil.