garrry73

So i got this old laptop (hp omnibook 4150, 500MHz PIII, 256RAM, 12GB HDD) and it had no os on it. I successfully installed XP Home on it and it worked ok, sluggish and glitchy at times, but for what it was, it was ok. I decided to install 98se on it and i have been having problems since the first 5 minutes. It goes into the format procedure and freezes at 29%, i have tries it several times, allowing it to sit for up to 3 hours and it always stops at 29%. I have looked into formatting in dos, by extracting the ebd format.com file and it tells me the file or folder is copywrite protected. I am at my wits end with this and am hoping someone can assist me. Its basically a project computer and i really wasnt that concerned about getting it running, but now that ive hit this roadblock, i would really like to get it up and running. By the way i am sure the disk is in good shape, i even copied it and verified it, it works well on other pc's. Thanks in advance for your help

Gary

blah789

The thing about XP is you can quickformat a non-formatted drive, which you won't be able to do with windows 98.
You might want to run a surface scan and hard drive diagnostics anyway (it's possibly just a bad sector, but at worst it could also be sign of drive failure).
Hard Drive Diagnostic Utilities

Anyway if you think it's just a bad sector and want to skip over it (AT YOUR OWN RISK - I'm not responsible if you lose data later on), boot from the XP CD, pick repair, then go into recovery console. type diskpart to partition the drive. then type
format c: /q /fs:fat32
/q means quick format. if you don't mention file system = fat32 it defaults to ntfs which you don't want. type exit to reboot.
After that you should be able to install Windows 98. I'd run scandisk from the command line at some point though. (press F8 at boot time, go to command line only, then type
scandisk c:
and do a surface scan)

If you think it's a drive failure, you can get an easy replacement these days. Just grab a NON-SATA 2.5" notebook internal drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...ue&Order=PRICE
If you plan on using Windows 98, I'd recommend getting a drive under 64GB. If you get a hard drive over 128GB, you'll need to slipstream SP1 or higher into your XP CD, or SP3 or higher into your Windows 2000 CD.

If you want a compromise between windows xp and 98se, try Windows 2000. It should run well on a P3 500. 2000 = same stability as windows xp, minus a few items I mentioned in this thread (the stuff i wrote is a bit outdated now), but uses a bit more resources than 98.

garrry73

ok i did the quick format, rebooted and was able to start the install process, it got to 3% and said the "SETUP.CAB" files could not be found, I hit ok (to retry) 3 times and it went on, now at 5% it tells me "NET8.CAB" files cannot be found, I hit ok to retry, the error message does not show, but it has been stuck at 5% for about 15 minutes, not showing any signs of progress? Any suggestions?

Thanks...
...Gary

blah789

Is that from the CD? If so I'm not sure where the problem is. Could be bad media (I doubt it, but you can test it by copying the contents of the Windows 98 CD onto a folder on another computer, see if you get stuck anywhere). Could be the failing hard drive (drive diagnostics should have told you). Or could be failing electronics elsewhere (motherboard, chipset, or something else).

garrry73

ok im going to run scandisk, ill post back when its complete with the results. Thanks again.

garrry73

Well I ran scandisk and it told me I have several bad sectors. I guess if I want to continue messing with this laptop, ill need a HDD. Its not worth the $60.00 to me to get a new one so i guess it'll go in the parts (junk) pile. Thanks for all your help, if nothing else it was a learning experience, and I guess thats why I do it. Again thanks and have a good day.

Gary

blah789

if a new (unused) drive is outside your budget, you can probably get one for cheaper on ebay. there's used (but working and bad-sector-free) drives out there