IBM desktop PC can not boot from CD

More than likely it doesn't support boot from CD. That is a feature that was not implemented in a lot of older computers. You need to boot it from a floppy. Search online for win98 boot floppy or find the original win98 setup floppy disk.

Mike

Yep, that's how things used to be. In a clean machine there are no CDROM drivers, so that's why you can't boot from it. The Win 98 floppys Mike mentions install DOS routines and a generic CDROM driver. Amongst DOS is FDISK for proper formatting and partitioning before installing Windows. Your CDROM may now appear as an odd Letter, look carefully at the text on screen, and you may notice it telling you that CDROM is drive R: or some such random letter. Type R: to get onto the drive, then you can type Setup and away you go.

Gareth.

Just a warning - last time I downloaded floppy boot disks from the Interweb, most of them (95 and 98) wouldn't work, don't know why. Could just have been my PC or the disks. Anyway I have one here that definately installs Win98 so if you have any bother I can email you a copy.

Gareth.

The CD ROM -- such as the one for W2K -- should have a utility that creates the required floppies.

Just had a look on my Win98SE disk and can't find the utility amongst the zillions of files. I know there is one that launches during setup, but can you launch it just off the CD?

Gareth.

William is correct that there is a utility on the Windows 2000 (and XP) cds for creating the set of floppies required to initialise the setup process if your system can't be booted from a cd. AFAIK there was no such utility on the Win98 cds.

To the OP: I am surprised that a P-II system does not support booting from cd. Be sure that your cd was made to be bootable. If it is an original operating system cd it should be. If you cannot find where to change the boot sequence there is often a hotkey that you can press at boot time to give you a menu of bootable drives to choose from. IIRC on IBM systems you need to press F12.

With win98 and earlier, yes. Use the boot floppy to load cdrom drivers and format the hard disk (if necessary), then just enter "D:\\setup"

Assuming that the cdrom is mounted as D:, of course.

Many computers from that era were supposed to be bootable from CD, but weren't. Presumably this came down to limitations in the BIOS's cdrom drivers. Seldom a problem in newer equipment.

As to boot images not working, the chances are very high that the disk, or drive, or both are faulty. I always found floppy disks to be a very delicate medium, with frequent failures of both disk and drive.

And how did you think that would help ?

Did you consider using 'disk clean up', defragging, or inspecting the number of programs automatically loaded at start-up ? Norton AV is a system performance killer for example especially on a PC of that vintage.

Is the CD drive even listed in the boot sequence options ? Booting from CD wasn't always possible.

Graham

Google bootmec.exe for an ME boot disk maker program.

Graham

Can supply confirmed good copy if requested. E_Mail appropriate information. Also Dos 6** Floppies if you so desire??