Upgrade Win98 to SE

I have an old PC at the cottage that is running an orig version of Win98 so presumably it makes sense to upgrade to Win98 SE.

I have a full-version (with s/n) WIN98 SE CD-ROM (which I thought was the Win98 o/s CD for this PC - since it's the only Win98 PC I have) but when I try to use it to upgrade this machine it says I need an 'upgrade' version (not the full version).

There must be some way to use this full ver CD to upgrade this PC (other than reformating and reinstalling everything).

Here's hoping there a relatively easy way to upgrade to SE using this Win98SE CD so that I can get a few more yrs out of this aging beast (Pentium 600).

 

Try the suggestions here.

http://home.satx.rr.com/badour/html/upgrade.html

 

Its a wise idea to upgrade to the SE
A lot of devices ( usb flash drives for example) demand the drivers of win 98 se
I used to think that an upgraded windows 98 was the same as se
Not so - additional drivers at the least
If the copies are legit maybe you can ask microsoft
They have stopped supporting windows 98 so do not know
You may have to reformat and reinstall after all

 

You can through the page Whiskeyman suggested, or you can take a shortcut and do this.
Boot the computer with a boot floppy, choosing with CD Rom support when prompted, and do this command at the prompt.
ren c:\windows\win.com win.old
After you do this, install Win 98 Se.
BTW, this command should start the install on the CD, if the hard drive has only C: on it.
e:\win98\setup

 

Thanks marrkp62 -very helpful and straight forward.

However when I boot from my start up floppy and from the c:\ prompt go to my CD drive (g:\) and use the dir command I can see the file listing on the Win98 CD but when I try to execute setup.exe I get a "Bad command or file name" error.

In fact I can't even "cd win98" to switch to the win98 subdir (or tools) - so for some reason I'm not able to properly read this CD from the start up floppy .

When I boot into Win98 I can easily see and open the Win98 files/folders on th CD drive so I don't think I have a problem with my CD drive (which is a Matshita CD-ROM CR-593 - and Device Mngr reports the device as working properly).

Very open for any ideas on figuring out how to read the cd files when I'm booting from the start up floppy.

EDIT - P.S. I also trying reading another (my WinXP) CD and can read (eg cd DOCS) that w/o problems - so it must be something to do with the Win98 "SE" CD - although why can I read/execute it OK in Windows?

 

When you use the boot floppy, the CD letter is not the letter you are used to while in windows. It gives a message with the drive assignments before the A:\> prompt appears. If it is usually G, it will be now H.

Here is what you can do, easier with the current windows 98 running. Create a folder (c:\win98?), then copy all the files from the CD's Win98 folder into it. There should be a total of 98 files.
You can then install 98 from that folder instead of the CD, which can be a big help later on if you can leave the files there.
When you boot with the floppy to install windows, you can choose 'without CD support' this time around.

 

Good advice and ideas - thanks.

I've been able to make good progress in a different way. I decided to make my own boot disk, so using the info from http://www.computerhope.com/boot.htm#08 I created a boot floopy and it was able to see/read/execute the files on the Win98 SE CD ROM - so (after renaming Win.com to Win.xxx) I am now running the "upgrade" program.

Trust everything will finish OK - so many thanks for help.