Win98 on Win7/32 install problems

[Gorlash]

From reading these topics, it appears many other people have gotten this to work, but somehow I can't get things to work.

After trying several other techniques, I created a merged CD which contains both a bootable Win98SE/DOS environment (with the Banana CDROM driver) as well as the full Win98SE CDROM. The install proceeds with no problems, until it boots into Win98SE and tries to proceed with the installation - at this point, it cannot find any of the required files from the CDROM (starting with dhcpcsvc.dll). It *appears* to expect to find them in the c:\windows\system\precopy directory, but the files that it is looking for are not there (though many other files are). I point it to the CDROM, but all those files are still buried in .cab files on the CD, and it doesn't seem to know how to handle that. I let it fail all the installs and Win98SE *does* start up, but with no network drivers installed. Also, if I try to reboot, I several errors about .vxd files not being present, starting with vnetbios.vxd.

I don't know how to solve this problem??

BTW, I tried several other install methods before this, all of which failed:

> boot from real Win98se boot floppy - VirtualBox does not see the floppy drive.
> create a boot floppy image to tell VB about - I cannot create any image that VB recognizes as being a floppy image; I tried several different programs, including UltraISO, WinISO and others.
> mount the boot ISO and Win98se install cd on different virtual controllers; VB will not successfully boot to the boot CD in this configuration (I tried several different combinations of master/slave controllers)

So after three days of endless different failure modes, my head is spinning and I've run out of ideas. Can anyone give any clues??

[stefan.becker]

No idea what you have done.

But remember: Win98 is 13 years old. So dont make new CD structures which win98 does not know.

Better make an image of a boot disc (a:) with cd driver "mscdex". This image can be mount with VBOX. This are structures win98 knows.

[Gorlash]

No, I didn't make any structures that Win98 wouldn't know about. The bootable ISO was a bootable ISO image of a Win98SE install floppy, with all the CDROM drivers (though it was an ISO, not an IMG, so I couldn't actually mount it as a floppy).

[stefan.becker]

With my original cd this works. Normally the windows installer knows in which cab file is which driver.

[Gorlash]

So what did you originally boot to, then? Did you use a physical floppy disk? I don't have one in my machine. I tried using a USB floppy, but while the Win7 host saw it present, as A:, VBox did not seem to see it at all. That's why I was using a Win98SE bootable iso, which I downloaded off the web, but that doesn't seem to be working very well.