How to make a full restore Win98se CD? (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Lehr]

I need to make a full restore Win98se CD to send to a friend who has a computer that is identical to mine (HP Vectra 300Mhz).
I bought a couple of these at a company auction and fixed one up and sent it to her, but it caught a virus and messed up everything.
My intention is to set up Win98 on my machine, burn it to CD and send it to her. She is very new to computers, so it needs to be easy to re-install on her computer.
I figured I could walk her through using the Western Digital utilities to write zeros to the drive, run fdisk, and format the drive.
I know Norton Ghost will do what I need, but I don't want to purchase it for just this purpose. Any free utilities (linux, perhaps?) that would make me a bootable, automatic restore CD so she could just pop it in and transfer it to her hard drive?

JGL

 

[Jerry Klawiter]

Why not just have her remove the HD and you re-image the drive, send the drive back and be done.
It may help to partition the drive and place the restore on the second partition for safe keeping next time.

 

[DaveF]

Why doesn't she use her Win98 install/recovery CD? My experience is that you boot from the boot floppy, insert the Win98 CD and reinstall just like you described.

And if you can talk her through the process of reformatting the HD, then I'd expect you could talk her through the Win98 installation; it's generally pretty straightfoward.

Is it necessary to to reinvent this wheel?

 

[Jerry Klawiter]

The win 98se is a bootable CD, the Vectra supports boot from CD.
Just have her place the win98 disc in the drive and start the computer.
You may need to have her set the bios to boot from cd as a startup option.
Unless its a bootleg hard drive install.
Then you have some extra work.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

He doesnt want to dick around with installing drivers and stuff- which he would ahve to do if fresh installing 98 from a cd.

I would use Ghost, I dunno if Symantec still has a free version- but with a little looking you could maybe come up with a trial version- you could send a ghost boot disc and gho image on cd and viola.

-V

 

[Ken Chan]

There's really no point in doing that, unless you just don't like the idea of a virus' bytes on the disk somewhere until it is overwritten.

As long as the existing partition is correct, all you need to do is an FDISK /MBR to make sure there are no viruses in the Master Boot Record.

Can you install 98 with a FORMAT /S or SYS command? (I skipped that one.) Does it fit on one CD? If so, after making a clean install of 98, you could:

1. Create a boot floppy with the 98 DOS. Basically, go to the MS-DOS prompt and FORMAT A: /S
2. Copy FDISK, the DOS CD-ROM driver, MSCDEX, FORMAT, and XCOPY to the floppy.
3. Load the CD-ROM driver in the CONFIG.SYS, and run MSCDEX in AUTOEXEC.BAT so you can see the CD-ROM drive (usually as D: )
4. At the end of AUTOEXEC.BAT, do something like:

FORMAT C: /S
XCOPY D: C: /S/E
FDISK /MBR
@pause WAIT TEN SECONDS AND REBOOT....

5. Make a bootable CD-ROM from that floppy. Don't finalize the CD.
6. Burn the clean install of 98 as the second session on the CD.

So at this point, you have a bootable CD that will boot, load the CD-ROM driver so that the clean install is accessible as D:, format the existing C: drive and copy the hidden system files, copy everything else over, and rewrite the MBR just in case. There would be a few dire warnings and prompts, but all she'd have to do is press Y and/or Enter.

Hmm, I wonder if you'll have to fiddle with the MSDOS.SYS file because of the BootGUI option. In that case, you might also need ATTRIB to make the file modifiable.

Anyway, if you can install 98 with FORMAT, then this should definitely be doable. Of course, you really need to test this, ideally with CD-R/W so you don't make coasters. Unless you have two Vectras, after you setup 98, you'd burn that onto its own CD, or copy everything onto another computer so you can burn it in step 6 above.

 

[Jeff Lehr]

Vince is right...the Win98 re-install isn't the problem. I have DSL, she's got dial-up. I wanted to get all the Windows Updates, plus other programs like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger, along with a couple games and other programs . If I had it all set up beforehand, she wouldn't have to mess with downloading anything.
Right now, the install is about 550Mb, so it would all fit on one CD.
Thanks, Ken...I'll experiment with your suggestion and see if I can make it work. So far I haven't found a trial version of Ghost.

JGL

 

[Ted Lee]

the only hassle with not using the restore cd is usually any special drivers for that prebuilt system.

although pretty much all the hp drivers are available on their website, it's still a hassle figuring out which is which.

 

[Kelvin Tucker]

You might want to try this site for building a CDBart's Boot CD