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KNO3

Sun May 13 2007, 03:30AM

Registered Member #780 Joined: Sun May 13 2007, 02:58AM
Location:
Posts: 9

I've had a Compaq Armada series 289OB for a while. It's got windows 98 installed but needs 98 SE to support USB drivers. I cannot install any drivers for my USB. It has no CDROM drive, only 3 1/2 floppy

.
I can connect via Dial up. I hate Dial up. Well, how can I get W98 to support the drivers? any help is apprecciated.

ragnar

Sun May 13 2007, 03:47AM

Registered Member #63 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 06:18AM
Location:
Posts: 1425

Wow, that is old; no CD-rom drive, teehee.

If you can get a Win98SE CD from someone/somewhere, it may be possible to start fresh and use some DOS laplink software like 'the flying dutchman' to transfer it over a parallel cable from another computer running DOS.

IIRC, you can just copy everything from the 'WIN98' directory to your hard-drive, and install it from there.

...

Sun May 13 2007, 04:02AM

Registered Member #56 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445

If you have the disk you should be able to send it over via xmodem or whatever with a null modem cable...

But if not...
It would take a while, but here you go....
1. Make a dos startup disk, or small linux boot disk, whatever get yourself into a terminal that has a partitioner (fdisk) and formatter(format or mkfs.fat32) and support for whatever the fastest way to get data on it is. If you have a crossover parallel cable, use that, or make a null modem cable...
2. boot up, and format the disk to have a partition that will fit the 153mb win98se disk. (so make it about 200mb) and the rest in your main partition.
3. copy the win98 image over to the new partition
4. go back to a dos boot disk, cd to the 200mb partition, run setup.exe
5. sit back and reminisce on days past
6. pray to who ever you think will help the most that you can find all of the necessary drivers...

You might be able to get away with making a directory on your hard drive (make sure to keep it out of the windows created directories) and copy the files there, and then run the upgrade install, but you will have problems when it tries to reboot. You should be able to boot the bootdisk and find the directory and setup.exe but no guarantees that will work. I know that I have done a fresh install from harddrive before.

KNO3

Sun May 13 2007, 04:54AM

Registered Member #780 Joined: Sun May 13 2007, 02:58AM
Location:
Posts: 9

would Ubuntu be a better upgrade to the crap windows 98. Ive heard somewhat about their open source ware. But would it be better?

Steve Conner

Sun May 13 2007, 10:36AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

I like Ubuntu, but it may run a bit slow if your hardware is really old. I wouldn't care to run it on anything less than a PIII with 256MB of memory. I have it on a 733MHz PIII desktop PC, and the speed is just sort of meh. I also tried it on a 1.8GHz P4 laptop and it worked great.

For legal reasons, we obviously can't tell you where to get a copy of Win98SE or a product key, but we can help you install it. I personally would take the hard drive out of the laptop, put it in a USB enclosure, and use another computer to erase the old Win98 installation (don't wipe everything though! you want the drive still to have DOS and be bootable!) and copy the contents of the Win98SE CD to it. You can then put it back in the laptop, boot from it and run the Win98SE installer.

Win98SE is still quite usable. I have it on an old laptop that I couldn't get Linux to work on, and I used it for music production right up until last year. The biggest PITA is that it doesn't recognise USB thumb drives, but the Maximus Decim USB storage class driver fixes that.

Bjørn

Sun May 13 2007, 10:40AM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

If you list the specifications it would help. Modern version of Linux needs a lot of RAM and harddrive space so unless your computer is more powerful than it sounds you might be better off with Windows 98.

I use Windows 98 on my really old oscilloscope laptop and it works well.

Sync

Sun May 13 2007, 01:39PM

Registered Member #510 Joined: Sat Feb 10 2007, 09:28AM
Location: Hannover
Posts: 12

Linux runs fine on old Laptops.. You just have to use a smaller window manager like XFCE or something like that. I have Ubuntu running on a lap with P1 166MHz, 96MB ram, XFCE and custom apps. Fast enough for IRC and surfing ;)

Bjørn

Sun May 13 2007, 01:57PM

Registered Member #27 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058

A laptop that does not have a CD-ROM player usually would have 8-32 MB of RAM and Linux does not like that at all. The Ubuntu setup program would not even load.

Alex

Sun May 13 2007, 04:01PM

Geometrically Frustrated
Registered Member #6 Joined: Thu Feb 02 2006, 04:18AM
Location: Bowdoin, Maine
Posts: 373

slackware should be easy to install on it, but don't expect it to act like a modern computer. I have slack 11.0 installed on my 166MHz pentium with 32MB of RAM, but I don't run any sort of graphics system on it.

You have an old and slow machine, and thus you will only be able to run old operating systems slowly. Linux won't magically change that. Most modern distros won't even begin to work, as Bjoern mentioned, the RAM requirements are just too high. Even an xubuntu lowmem install requires something like 128MB of RAM.

Tesla_Cubed

Mon May 14 2007, 01:53PM

Registered Member #594 Joined: Tue Mar 20 2007, 04:02PM
Location: Joplin Mo USA
Posts: 6

Check out DSL linux it will run in less than 64mb and preforms ok for as tiny as it is. I use it on a old 96mb P233 think-pad that my mom had. All usb stuff seems to work ok.

Also smart boot can help out if you have hardware to boot from usb, zip, cd, whatever... that your bios wont support.

Its tiny and loads before the os with a minimal set of drivers then hands off to whatever you tell it to boot from.

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