windows 98 won't install

[Cupar19]

Device driver not found: 'OEMD001'.

No valid CDROM device drivers selected

 

The Windows 98 Setup files were not found.

 

A:\>

 

this is not using an original windows 98 disc, but the laptop (sony vaio PCG-505G) is designed for windows 98.

 

how do i solve this

 

thanks

[Radium_Angel]

4 minutes ago, Cupar19 said:

Device driver not found: 'OEMD001'.

No valid CDROM device drivers selected

 

The Windows 98 Setup files were not found.

 

A:\>

 

this is not using an original windows 98 disc, but the laptop (sony vaio PCG-505G) is designed for windows 98.

 

how do i solve this

 

thanks

If memory serves me right from way back when, you needed a floppy disc with the cd-rom drivers for your laptop. Without that, win98 didn't/couldn't talk to the cd-rom drive.

[Dujith]

Welcome to the wonderful world of a dos based OS  The default CD ROM driver prob wont work with the sony so you will need to load a driver for that drive.

[Cupar19]

3 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

If memory serves me right from way back when, you needed a floppy disc with the cd-rom drivers for your laptop. Without that, win98 didn't/couldn't talk to the cd-rom drive.

anyway around that because i don't have a floppy disc

[Cupar19]

how can i install the driver?

[mariushm]

Are you sure the hard drive is even working?

If you boot without a CD/DVD in, do you get to some DOS prompt, is something loaded from the hard drive?

 

If you're sure the hard drive is functional and  insist on using Windows 98... then I can suggest trying to copy the Windows files to your hard drive and launching the setup from there. You need to have some DOS command line knowledge to create folders on your c drive, and copy the files over, then launch the setup from that folder

 

You'd be better off trying to install WIndows 2000, it will probably work much better.

 

// how can i install the driver?

 

Typically you would create a bootable floppy disk and then copy the CD-ROM driver to the floppy disk and you'd edit the AUTOEXEC.bat file on the floppy disc to load the driver automatically.

It's not easy for someone that only used Windows.

 

[Cupar19]

when booting it says operating system not found, so im not sure that the drive works and have no dos knowledge at all. The reason for 98 is that i would like to sell the laptop as original and it came with 98

[mariushm]

The operating system not found simply tells you that the laptop looked through devices that support boot and couldn't find a bootable drive... hard drive could be completely dead and the laptop would skip over it to search for other places to boot from like network card or optical drive.

Can you enter bios to see if a hard drive is detected?

 

I'd still say f..k it ... forget about windows 98, whoever buys it can install 98 themselves...people won't care that it's Windows 98 or 2000, and 2000 will be more stable and better.  Both are ancient and don't require activations, don't have WIndows update support, they're all basically equally crap but 2000 is slightly less crap.

Chances are you'll find more drivers for Windows XP/2000 (the XP drivers will work in 2000) compared to Windows 98.

 

[Cupar19]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The operating system not found simply tells you that the laptop looked through devices that support boot and couldn't find a bootable drive... hard drive could be completely dead and the laptop would skip over it to search for other places to boot from like network card or optical drive.

Can you enter bios to see if a hard drive is detected?

 

I'd still say f..k it ... forget about windows 98, whoever buys it can install 98 themselves...people won't care that it's Windows 98 or 2000, and 2000 will be more stable and better.  Both are ancient and don't require activations, don't have WIndows update support, they're all basically equally crap but 2000 is slightly less crap.

Chances are you'll find more drivers for Windows XP/2000 (the XP drivers will work in 2000) compared to Windows 98.

 

ok what am i looking for in bios to suggest the drive isn't dead

[Cupar19]

6 minutes ago, Cupar19 said:

ok what am i looking for in bios to suggest the drive isn't dead

i can't see anything suggesting that a harddrive is working in the system

[mariushm]

Then you may have to buy a hard drive for it.

Judging by the age, you're probably looking at a 2.5" IDE (PATA) hard drive with that laptop specific ata connector with 44 pins or something like that... which would practically be impossible to find today.

You'd probably be able to use an adapter that converts the pata connector to MMC or sata (and extract the pcb from a ssd to squeeze in the 2.5" location together with the adapter board), something like this for example : https://www.dx.com/p/2-5-44-pin-female-ide-to-sata-male-fast-chips-adapter-2008443#.XFceH2mxVhE

 

 

[Cupar19]

2 minutes ago, mariushm said:

Then you may have to buy a hard drive for it.

Judging by the age, you're probably looking at a 2.5" IDE (PATA) hard drive with that laptop specific ata connector with 44 pins or something like that... which would practically be impossible to find today.

You'd probably be able to use an adapter that converts the pata connector to MMC or sata (and extract the pcb from a ssd to squeeze in the 2.5" location together with the adapter board), something like this for example : https://www.dx.com/p/2-5-44-pin-female-ide-to-sata-male-fast-chips-adapter-2008443#.XFceH2mxVhE

 

 

i dont even know if thats possible, i just tried to remove the bottom to get to the hdd to see if it was even their and over half the screws are totally stripped

[Cupar19]

in its current condition how much do you think its worth, and how much if i fix it

[Radium_Angel]

22 hours ago, Cupar19 said:

in its current condition how much do you think its worth, and how much if i fix it

I wouldn't give you a dime for it.

It's utterly worthless. Drop it off to a Goodwill and get a tax writeoff. 

[DavidKalinowski]

On 2/3/2019 at 11:07 AM, Cupar19 said:

in its current condition how much do you think its worth, and how much if i fix it

Think of it like this, windows 98 came out in 1998, its 2019, that is a 21 year old computer, most people dont keep cars that long. you'd be lucky to get 5 bucks for it.

[FlappyBoobs]

On 2/3/2019 at 6:07 PM, Cupar19 said:

in its current condition how much do you think its worth, and how much if i fix it

At best it is a Pentium MMX 266Mhz with 32Mb Ram and 2Gb hard disk. 

 

For comparison a Samsung Galaxy S (the first ever version of it) had a cpu that was 4 times as powerful, had 16 x the RAM and 4 times the storage space.

 

That laptop is not worth spending anytime on at all, you would spend more money on the electricity posting the advert than the thing is actually worth. Unless it is in perfect condition, complete in box with manuals, then you can maybe find some sort of enthusiast or museum that will give you $10 for it. 

[Pasi123]

You might be able to get about 50€ for it on ebay. Recently there was one sold for 86.63€ ($99).

 

This forum isn't the best one to ask anything about old computers. I'd recommend checking some retro pc related forums like vogons.org.