install to D:

I wanted to have an all-SCSI system, and it worked perfectly in Win95C -- but I need Win98 for full USB support and some other things. I tried installing Win98SE, but it just refuses to boot in an all-SCSI environment.

It looks like my only no-cost solution is to get my 730 meg IDE hard drive from my 486 days and use that to boot from. Unfortunately, it's 4500 rpm with a 128K cache and only goes up to 13.3M DMA mode. It won't be much fun running Win98 off of that. I know I should be able to specify D:\WINDOWS during Win98 install. Beyond that, how can I make sure the slow C: will rarely/never be used beyond boot? (Ok, I could also use it as a place to dump new downloads.) Hopefully using D:\WINDOWS will help keep the boot itself from being slowed much.

The BIOS only takes up to 8.4 gig drives (unless I use a beta BIOS), so if I'm going to buy another hard drive I'd rather it be SCSI. An IDE card won't work because I have no PCI slots left.

 

Windows9x will require that you install it on the C: drive as the Primary system. That's just the way it's designed. I think you're dead in the water with that hardware.

 

Actually I've installed win 98 on a 'D' partition, not a seperate drive, with no problem. I put 98 on D and win 2000 on C. The only thing you must do is to have C be FAT32. 98 seems to insist on this along with the win 98 drive or partition also being FAT 32.

One work around on this might be (never tried it) to partition as small a partition as C in FAT 32 along with the install partition. You SHOULD then be able to partition anything else as you please. Just remember that 98 will not see NTFS.

Another thought would be to throw in the old drive as a FAT 32 and just install to D. Windows 98 should default to the drive it's installed on for other installations. Just then use drive C for backup of personal files and such.

 

I have no problem with making everything FAT32. I can have a single partition on the 730 drive and holding CONFIG.SYS, COMMAND.COM, etc. Except for this minimum set of files, I want everything else on the SCSI D:. I could even set up a fixed swap file on the 730, but it would probably be better to put that on the faster SCSI drive.