Booting 98 or ME from CD

[MurphmanL]

Hey all, got a riddle for you all here.
How does one boot 98 or ME from a floppy without a floppy drive?
Seems I can't as I don't have a floppy on a laptop i aqquired off ebay so cd is the only option.
Unfortunately I cant boot from my 98 cd or ME so I'm wondering if anyone knows of a cd image that alteratively acts the same way as a 98 / ME floppy boot disc? Tried burning the contents of a 98/ME bootable diskette to a cd but no such luck with booting from it
Any Ideas?

[madman045]

does your laptop allow you to boot from usb? make a usb pen bootable?

[MurphmanL]

fresh out of usb pens or sticks for that matter, is it not possible to make a cd boot diskette?

[nichomach]

Why can't you boot from the CD? All 98SE and ME CDs are bootable. It should simply be a case of at worst changing the boot order in BIOS.

[mike_w]

I think my 98SE disc boots straight off the CD, although it has been some time since I installed it. Any particular reason to use the old Windows line, rather than something based on NT? If speed is a problem, I'd heartily recommend Linux instead Although it would be quite impressive if you'd bought a computer that cannot run XP - if so, it must be pretty old!

[MurphmanL]

Its an old laptop off ebay, and doesnt have a floppy. The two cds are backups of original 98 and ME discs for situations like these...
Unfortunately for me im no longe in possession of the originals The only reason i want to roll back is as the display adapter drivers are only compatible with windows 9x, and I cant get decent frame rates on videos or games without the hardware acceleration from the video card
If anyone knows of XP or 2k drivers for the adapter, its a Toshiba Satellite Pro 480 laptop.

[mike_w]

I can't seem to find your model, but I did find this page:

http://uk.computers.toshiba-europe.c...jsp?service=UK

Check your model number, and then you can use that page to get a driver.

Edit: Found it. Product as Archived Files, Family as Satellite Pro, Product Series as 4xx, Model as 480, hit search, and it gives you all the drivers. Although there is no 2000/XP driver, you could always try the NT driver (disclaimer: it might work. It might not.)

Edit 2: You might also want to try getting the driver from this list, providing you can find the name of the graphics controller (should be in System, or wherever it normally is):

http://www.asiliant.com/driver.htm

[nichomach]

I cant get decent frame rates on videos or games without the hardware acceleration from the video card

Chips & Technologies 65555 chipset
VGA/SVGA compatible
2MB VRAM

Ouch! IS there any hardware acceleration in that?

[JimmyBoy]

hmm, my 98se isnt bootable, but wat u could do (it might work) is backup ur 98se disc but copy the boot disc onto the cdr aswell i believe u can d/l a lil proggie that creates a boot disc from the ms site...

no idea if it works, but if ur able to try it, its worth a shot

[mike_w]

If the chipset is 65555, then that page has the drivers for it. Here are the XP drivers: http://www.asiliant.com/sw/WXPv251c.zip

[oralpain]

My 98SE cd is defiantly not (and never has been) bootable, you need the boot disk for it.

If you could make a bootable cd that actually loads dos and dos cd drivers you could swap the 98 or ME disk back in and use it.

[MurphmanL]

Any idea where I can get a DOS cd rom from?
Best I can seem to find is the Ultimate Boot CD, which from the info on the site doesn't seem to provide any utilities i need at the moment

[nichomach]

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

[MurphmanL]

Thanks, but all those boot disk utilities make bootable floppies. Unfortunately my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive

[nichomach]

True, but you should be able to burn a bootable CD, so you could unpack the files there to your CD image. Best I can think of. Nero, at least, gives you the option to burn a bootable CD and also do floppy emulation and stuff like that.

[mike_w]

I apologise if this is wrong, but surely if you have the XP drivers, you can now just use XP instead? I thought that was your reason for not using it?