Windows 98 on CD

Step Eight: Preparation of Ramdisk and Startup files

Months ago I prepared a nice Floppy image which I use for all my testing on the differing windows versions I have worked on (4 to date). Set it up well, and it will really facilitate doing all this. For this portion of the work, you can just edit the files on the hard drive which used to boot the windows system we’re working on. After each step, I’ll include the calls I use.

a. Config.sys

There is not much that has to be special here. Two calls are important, though: Himem and your CD driver. I use oakCDrom.sys. Make sure these are working correctly.

oakcdrom.sys /D:oemCD001

himem.sys

b. Autoexec.bat

Here’s where some more magic happens. Quite a few special things must be done here. Lets start with the normal, though.

a. Mscdex – use the correct parameters to make CD drives begin at Y.

mscdex /d:oemCD001 /L:Y

b. Smartdrv – don’t forget this, or say hello to SLOW unzip times

Smartdrv.exe

Now to the special section.

c. Xmsdsk – This is where we set up a ram disk. If you have done your job well in preparing the windows and program files directories, you should have less than 110MB in them, giving around 45MB worth of archives. We can therefore set up set it up as drive x: with 110MB of space. It leaves us 18MB working memory for windows98, which is just right.

xmsdsk 110000 x: /y /t /c2

d. Doslfn – This is necessary to maintain long files names when you unzip your archives under dos. This is mucho importante as your system will work without it, but it will be botched up.

doslfn

e. Copying – we have to do some initial copying of the floppy image files to the ramdisk here. I do it like this:

md x:\windows

md x:\windows\command

copy command\*.* x:\windows\command

copy command.com x:

Using the command files from the floppy image helps spare room on my windows disks, and it cuts about .45 seconds off boot time as copying is always faster than unzipping.

f. Pkunzip – now we can begin to unzip our archives into the ramdisk. You have to overwrite files (-o) and recurse directories (‑d) , so we do it like this:

pkunzip y:\windows.zip X: -d -o

pkunzip y:\programs.zip x:\ -d -o

g. We can now exit the DOSLFN api. Windows doesn’t care about it, but its always nice to free up about .00004KB of memory by killing it.

Exit

h. Now we need to set up path variables and basically everything to drive X so that A isn’t unnecessarily accessed, slowing the system down. Ram disk access is lightning fast, so its just amazing to use it instead of the CD. Here’s what we set:

path=X:\WINDOWS;X:\WINDOWS\COMMAND

Microsoft also had the foresight to allow for booting off something that wouldn’t be the main system drive, and this helps us a lot. It lets us access the command.com on X instead of the one on the emulated drive A:. here’s how to do it:

set COMSPEC=X:\Windows

i. Now we’ll just change to x: before it boots into windows to finally get out of drive A:

c. MSDOS.SYS Here’s another little file to edit so we can be sure the computer knows to look at the X: drive. Edit Msdos.sys and make the references to X instead of C: or D: or whever you started. Here’s what the necessary lines look like in my msdos.sys

[Paths]

WinDir=X:\WINDOWS

WinBootDir=X:\WINDOWS

HostWinBootDrv=X

At the bottom of MSDOS.SYS, I also have these lines:

DBLSpace=0

DRVSpace=0

DisableLog=1

LoadTop=0

WinVer=4.10.1998

Network=0

BootWarn=0