Installing Win98 from USB with Easy2Boot

Install Windows 98SE/ME from an ISO file on an Easy2Boot USB drive

The instructions below will allow you to add a Windows 98 ISO file to your Easy2Boot drive and install Win98 to an internal hard disk.
It should also work for Windows ME.

Please check the following requirements before you begin!

The target system must be able to boot from a USB drive (Flash or HDD)
The target system must have an IDE hard disk drive / MSata with IDE Adapter / Compact Flash with IDE Adapter (set the 'Legacy/IDE' setting in the BIOS setup menu if you have a SATA hard drive fitted - do not use 'AHCI')
Older system BIOSes may have a 137GB hard disk limit - installing onto a hard disk larger than 137GB may cause problems (also using a USB Hard Disk larger than 137GB may cause problems - E2B will warn you if this is the case) - see here for more details.
Your target system will need 256MB or more of memory (the ISO contents are copied to RAM) - however, systems with more than 1GB may also cause memory problems.
You will need a utility to delete some folders from inside the Win98SE ISO - e.g. UltraISO (so you don't lose the boot sectors from the ISO).
Win98 may not have the correct drivers for your audio, network and graphics devices
Windows 98 SE bootable ISO.

Prepare the USB drive

1. Make an E2B bootable USB drive
2. Edit the Windows 98 SE ISO file that you have obtained and leave only the files in the root (top level) and the \win98 folder. Use UltraISO to do this.
   (The reason that we need to delete the other folders is that the E2B copy process will fail if there are too many files. Also, we don't need these folders to install Windows 98.)
3. Copy the reduced-size ISO (approx 180MB) to the E2B USB drive _ISO\WIN folder and rename the extension file to .ISODOS01

Installing Windows 98SE

1. Boot from the USB E2B drive on the target system. Select WINDOWS and the .isodos01 file and run it.
   (If you see some error messages as the files are copied to memory, this is usually because the ISO contains files with long filenames - delete it from ISO.)

2. If you see a message to boot from the Hard Disk or CD-ROM, choose the 'Boot from CD-ROM' option.

3. Choose Option 3 to boot without CD-ROM support:

4. You should now be at the MS-DOS A:> prompt.

5. Type FDISK and press the ENTER key and answer 'Y' to the questions about large disk support.

6. Now select option 5 and check that Disk 1 is the drive that you want to install Win98 onto. Press <ESC> to return to the main FDISK Options menu and use the menu to create a DOS Primary bootable partition on Disk 1.
   (Note: FDISK may be old and may not work with large hard drives properly! In 1998, all hard disks were IDE\ATAPI (not SATA) and were smaller than 137GB!
   You may have problems if your hard disk is larger than 137GB. FDISK may report 'weird' sizes.)

7. When this has been created, you must reboot again from the Win98SE ISO using E2B.

8. Now we can format the new partition. Type:

B:\
cd Win98
FORMAT C:

9. Now we are ready to install Windows 98 to the blank, freshly formatted (FAT32) drive C:.

10. Now type SETUP (or INSTALAR in Brazilian Portuguese ISO) and then press the ENTER key. This starts the Windows install process.

11. If you get an error about a TEMP folder, type the following commands to make Setup use a folder on the B: drive as a temporary folder:

mkdir B:\TEMP
INSTALAR /T:b:\temp

Use C:\Windows as the install folder.
When requested to make Startup (floppy) Disk, click Next and then Cancel.

12. The Win98 Setup process will restart several times - you can remove the E2B USB drive at this point so that it reboots directly from the internal hard disk.