Sounds odd, but... I have a stero called a Sony LISSA and it has software which only works on Windows 98. I have purchased an oldish laptop with no floppy drive and only a USB dvd rom drive. The laptop is currently running windows xp and I need to get rid of it and install windows 98. Another problem is that MY PC is from Tiny (I know, WHY)... and the Fkrs have glued the IDE leads into both my hard drives and the motherboard, and I cant remove them to replace onw with the laptops drive. What can I do, as I have only ever upgraded OS and never downgraded, and Also I have never tried doing it on a laptop which hasnot built in drives. I do have an external USB hard drive if this will help in any way... (it is a laptop HD in a casing, if need be I could put the original laptop HD in it to install anything onto it). Anyone?.
in the bios does it give you the option to boot off usb drives?? do you have a working bootable win98se cd?
I have the windows 98SE CD, I must admint I have yet to of checked the bios, I will give it a look when I get home and let you know.
ok, boot with the 98 startup disk (or boot from cd if you can). run fdisk on the c: drive (fdisk c:\ or fdisk c. what you need to do is get a dos prompt (to whatever drive you're attempting to install from) get in there and remove the nfts partion that xp runs under. (you may have to chose "remove non-dos partition" it's been awile since i've seen these screens lol) reboot after each step. then fdisk again and create main partition, i think its called. when you get the partition set up, and taking up all the room on your HD, reboot, and type "format c:" after a boot, you should be able to install win98
chromesn, you have it partly right but don't need to reboot after each step. type fdisk at the prompt, yes to large size drive. comes up with a menu of 4 options, select #3 to delete partition than select non-dos partition. once partition is done, select #1 to make partition & to be active. it will verify twice to make certain drive is all right & before 2nd time it will ask you do you want to use maximium size, select yes. once that is done, press esc to get out of fdisk than restart the computer. you have to format the drive before windows goes on or let windows do it for you. once format is done than type setup to install windows unless windows starts installing itself.
Virtulization may be another option. I don't know how often you use the LISSA software, but you can use something like VMWare or Virtual PC to install Windows 98 in a virtual machine running on XP. That way you don't have to mess with your existing installation. I know VMWare has a free trial to see if it would work for you.
