Windows 98 on CD

Step One: Install windows with 98Lite

a.       After downloading 98lite, extract the archive and run it. It will tell you what to do.  When prompted for installation options, choose sleek (if you have the free version of 98 lite) or micro (if you bought it). The micro install can seriously be trimmed down to under 40 megabytes.  If you intend to make a CD utilizable on systems with 64 MB ram, you should seriously consider this choice.

If you need to, install to a second disk drive or to a small (<300MB) partition on which your main OS is NOT installed.  This is important as you can really fry windows XP or any other version this why. Even if you do not utilize the Windows folder, the “program files” directory will be written over, which is NOT GOOD.  Be careful what you choose here.

b.      During windows install, make sure the choose minimal possible options – don’t put any backgrounds or other needless windows elements.  The installation drive and directory don’t really matter, but be sure not to overwrite your present windows and program files folders.  This basically means it would be a good idea to perform the install on a small clean partition, because the installation will place its “program files” folder on whichever partition is chosen to install windows (In practice, this means installing on c:\Windoze in order to avoid overwriting files in c:\windows is a really bad idea, because files in c:\program files will be overwritten.  Follow through the entire install process for windows – on a modern system, this will not take terribly long – your install is done from the HD and goes quick. 

c.       Install all your drivers for base hardware that you would like to work from this CD.  Make sure all your hardware works like you want; this is especially important for networking and DUN.  I find it easier for some reason, to not install windows98 Dun but to re-download version 1.4 from Microsoft and install it. This seems to avoid some network install problems I encountered and had to fix when initially installing it from the setup files.

There are some tricks to saving up space here too: lots of driver files are unnecessary, such as some of the keyboard drivers and Human Interface Device drivers. System properties will tell you that there’s a problem, but the hardware works correctly anyway. Be careful about this kind of testing; always move the drivers and don’t just delete them, that way you can put them back if they do not work correctly.

d.      After your drivers are working, install all your windows tweaks, such as the 98 power toys, etc. After installing the send to extensions, be sure to put a shortcut to Notepad.exe in %root%/windows/send to  and later do the same for your hex editor. This is a nice little trick for editing files.  There are many other tricks you can do, but I’ll leave that all up to you.

Exit to dos, and run scanreg /opt /fix. After returning to windows, you can delete the windows\system.bad and windows\user.bad files.