Resolved Windows 98 unable to install

Hello,

I have an Acer NoteLight 370PCX which is Pentium-based with 64MB of RAM. It has an external floppy drive and a internal CD drive. I want to upgrade to Windows 98 SE from Windows 95. However, I experienced the following problems:

1. The external floppy drive is malfunctioned. It is detectable by the system, and the machine has the ability to boot up from this specific external floppy drive, but unusable. => No floppies can be read, even the new one.

2. Laptop's CMOS battery is out of power as it displays "CMOS Battery Bad" at the POST procedure.

3. As mentioned above, the data inside the CMOS is always the default settings of the factory, and the default settings set "Boot for CD Drive" is "Disabled ", which means boot from disc is NOT possible. => Already tried with AC adapter plugged and battery fully-charged to see if the power required by CMOS can be provided here. However, no luck.

4. I tried to replace the CMOS battery. However, the machine is specifically designed to not let you dis-assembly, even the keyboard cannot be removed to see the components inside. Only hard drive and RAM case are accessible. I have Googled a lot, with some sites claim they have the detailed information for the CMOS battery replacement method. However, the links provided are all down.

5. Inserted Windows 98 Installation Disc and booted up Windows 95, then opened the installer and selected "Yes" to upgrade. However, the installer denied the upgrade because it is the retail version. It says that the only the upgrade version is applicable if I want to upgrade with Windows 95 booted up.

6. This machine has hard drive boot up ability ONLY now. I removed the hard drive and clone the image of it via other computer. Then removed the Windows 95 inside the hard drive and installed Windows 98 on the other computer. After the installation was completed (didn't install the drivers of that so-called "other computer" to prevent interference), move the hard drive back to that Acer machine, and the system displayed, "Invaild system disk. Replace the disk and press any key." However, install the hard drive back on the "other computer ", it boots Windows 98.
Oh! No! That's weird. I remember Windows 9x systems can be installed on the other machine and boots up on the original machine successfully. Only NＴ-based needs to clear SID before the hard drive is transmitted to other computers. Then... how could this be?

* Note: After the failure boot up, I restored the image of the hard drive. It returned. Now it is Windows 95 again.

Please help, I need to upgrade the system. Any suggestions is appreciated. Thanks!

 

There is a method that may work for you. Boot into Win95, then open Windows Explorer and create a folder on the harddrive at the root of the drive, name it 'Win98' to keep it simple, so it will be C:\Win98. Then insert the Win98 CD and copy all the files from the Win98 folder on the CD to the Win98 folder on the harddrive.
Then locate C:\Msdos.Sys, right-click on it and select Properties, uncheck Read Only and then Apply. Then open Msdos.Sys with Notepad. You will see a line such as this;
BootGUI=1
Change the 1 to a 0 (zero), Save your changes then reboot.
This will cause win95 to boot to a command prompt instead of going all the way into windows. When you get to the prompt, type in this command.
c:\win98\setup.exe
If at this time you get a message about this version needs to be installed on a new computer, do these commands, pressing Enter at the end of each line.
ren c:\windows\win.com win.old
c:\win98\setup.exe
Hope this helps.

 

Awesome! This really works! Thanks markp62. I am really appreciate your help.

I followed the instructions above and installed Windows 98 SE in a new folder called, "Win98SE ". After the installation, boots up Windows 98. Delete the old "WINDOWS" folder which contains Windows 95 and delete some Windows 95 backups, such as: Msdos.---; Msdos.bak; IO.bak; Config.---, etc. Also with some un-updated applications in the "Program Files" folder. Then I modified "AUTOEXEC.BAT" because it left intact => as same as Windows 95 one. Just delete some strings (unnecessary in Windows 98), and add two commands "date" and "time" to prompt me enter the current date/time before Windows fully initialized.

Now the Windows 98 works smoothly on this Pentium-based machine. Thanks again markp62!

 

You're welcome.