If you have experience installing other Microsoft operating systems, installing Windows 98 is a relatively simple process. With some forethought and planning, your Windows 98 installations should go quickly and smoothly. This chapter details the process for installing Windows 98 on stand-alone PCs and the process for installing Windows 98 on the local hard drive of PCs in a networked envi- ronment. This chapter primarily addresses two types of readers: those who want to install Windows 98 on a single, stand-alone PC, and system administrators installing
Windows 98 on one or more networked PCs. Chapter 4, "Troubleshooting Setup and Startup," will help you troubleshoot your Windows 98 installation. The following topics are covered in this chapter:
Those of you who feel confident in your ability to install Windows 98 can start immediately by turning to the section "Installing Windows 98," found later in this chapter. If you feel you require more information about installing Windows 98, the following sections provide all of the details you need for a successful Windows 98 setup.
NOTE: Unless otherwise specified, throughout the book, the term Windows 3.x refers equally to Windows and Windows for Workgroups versions 3.1 and 3.11. It does not, however, include Windows 3.0.
As with previous releases of Windows operating systems, Windows 98 deploys the familiar Setup program for installing and configuring Windows 98 on your PC. In a stand-alone installation, the operating system is installed on the hard drive of a local computer that is not part of a network. If you are a network administrator, you might require centralized control over the Windows 98 load, in which case you can install a shared copy of Windows 98. This shared server-based installation locates the majority of the Windows 98 files on the server and a minimal set of files on the client workstation. This chapter describes the overall Setup process and explains how to perform a stand-alone installation. A server-based setup is explained in Chapter 3, "Advanced Setup."
To install Windows 98 from within Windows 95, run the Setup program from the Windows 98 CD while you're in Windows 95. In most cases, all you need to do to automatically start the Setup program is insert the Windows 98 CD into the system's CD-ROM drive. This topic is discussed in more detail later in this chapter in the section called "Installing Windows 98."
When installing Windows 98 on a PC running a previous version of DOS and Windows 3.x, Setup replaces some of the existing DOS files and renames others. If you install Windows 98 into a new directory (and don't upgrade an existing Windows installation), you can boot your previous version of DOS. If you upgrade your existing version of Windows to Windows 98, you cannot boot to your old version of DOS. This is not a problem, however, because the DOS core included in Windows 98 is fully compatible with the DOS environment it replaces.
The setup process for Windows 98 is designed to make the upgrade path seamless from either Windows 95 or Windows 3.x. You can upgrade directly from either operating system. Windows 98 Setup obtains information about the utilities that you have already installed and only updates those components. Full hardware detection during the initial setup is no longer necessary.
Two different versions of the Windows 98 product are available: a full version and an upgrade version. The upgrade version is intended for PCs that already contain a copy of Windows 3.x (including Windows 3.0), Windows 95, Windows NT, or OS/2. Because previous versions of Windows relied on the DOS operating system, these systems also contain a working copy of DOS. You can't use the upgrade version to install Windows 98 on a PC unless that PC contains a copy of one of the other operating systems previously mentioned.
The full Windows 98 version is intended for PCs that contain a DOS operating system but not a copy of a previous version of Windows, as well as for PCs that have no operating system installed. Therefore, you must have the full version before you can install Windows 98 on a new, unpartitioned, unformatted hard disk. The full version includes a boot disk that enables Setup to boot the PC and then partition and format the hard disk for Windows 98. When you start Setup from the boot disk, it also can read your PC's CD-ROM drive to enable you to install Windows 98 from CD.
As with most operating systems, Windows 98 requires a minimum hardware configuration. The word minimum needs to be stressed here. The following list describes the minimum requirements as well as suggested requirements. The suggested requirements assume a system with a stand-alone, local installation and a system that will, over time, take on a greater workload.
NOTE: If the system contains Windows NT or OS/2, however, you must be able to dual-boot the existing system (boot to DOS versus booting to Windows NT or OS/2), because Windows 98 Setup is a Win16 application that you have to run from real-mode DOS or Windows 3.x (except Windows 3.0). If the PC contains another operating system not yet mentioned here, such as UNIX, you can still install Windows 98. To do so, however, you must install Windows 98 into a FAT disk partition. To boot a particular operating system after you install Windows 98, use the FDISK utility (available in both UNIX and Windows 98) to make the operating system's partition active and then restart the system.
In addition to the operating system requirements described previously, the hard disk on which you plan to install Windows 98 must use the FAT file system. You can't install Windows 98 in a Windows NT NTFS or OS/2 HPFS partition. Windows 98 does support FAT partitions created using FDISK on removable drives, including those from Iomega and Bernoulli.
WARNING: If your PC contains an NTFS or HPFS file system in addition to a FAT partition, and you install Windows 98 into the FAT partition, you need to be aware that Windows 98 cannot read the files on the NTFS or HPFS partitions. Windows 98 supports only FAT partitions. If your disk has been partitioned using Disk Manager (DMDRVR.BIN), SpeedStor (SSTOR.SYS), or another third-party utility, Setup converts these partitions to standard FAT partitions.
As stated previously, Setup can be used to install Windows 98 in stand-alone and shared configurations, locally or across the network. Setup can also be used to reinstall, repair, or update an existing Windows 98 installation. Optionally, you can use the Add/Remove Programs icon in the Control Panel to add and remove Windows components and Windows applications, and to create a Windows 98 boot disk (see Figure 2.1). Upgrading and repairing Windows 98 and creating a boot disk are explained in more detail in Chapter 4.
FIGURE 2.1 Add/Remove Programs Properties dialog box.
While the setup process is running, various tasks are performed on the system, regardless of the type of installation you choose:
WARNING: You must install Windows 98 over your existing copy of Windows 3.x or Windows 95 if you want to be able to run your existing Windows applications under Windows 98. If you install Windows 98 to a new directory and keep your existing Windows 3.x or Windows 95 installation, you still have to reinstall the majority of your Windows applications under Windows 98 before they run properly in Windows 98.
Before you install Windows 98, you need to understand a few key points about it so you can integrate Windows 98 with your existing operating system and applications. The next section explains these key points.
It is always a good idea to put together a plan prior to running the Windows 98 Setup. This will go a long way toward optimizing the installation. This plan addresses common issues when installing or upgrading any operating system and those specific to Windows 98. Planning insures a smooth installation while dealing with potential setup concerns ahead of time. Optimizing and preparing the system for installation of Windows 98 includes three basic steps, described briefly in the following sections.
Regardless of whether you are installing Windows 98 from scratch or performing an upgrade from a previous version of Windows, if the system on which you are installing Windows contains important data files, it is necessary to make a backup of those files. Though the installation of Windows 98 should go well, it is always best to prepare for the worst. To backup the data, you can use a third-part backup utility or, if applicable, Windows 98 backup utility. At the very least, backup to disk your important documents.
After installation, you can use the Windows 98 Backup utility. It is a 32-bit program that you can use to back up data to tape or disk. The backup interface is very user friendly, almost identical to the one found in Windows 95, as it is structured similarly to the Explorer interface with its folder and file trees. As such, it supports dragging and dropping folders, single files, or groups of files (see Figure 2.2).
FIGURE 2.2 The Microsoft Backup interface dialog box.
There are three ways to perform a backup from within Windows 98:
FIGURE 2.3 Initiating backup.
The Windows 98 Backup utility enables the user to perform a full backup and restore, as well as a file comparison between volumes. In addition to supporting full and differential backups, Windows 98 allows redirecting a file restore to a different partition, as well as erasing the destination backup media prior to a backup. Backup supports the following media types and methods:
It is always a good idea to do a little housekeeping before installing a new operating system. Remove any files and folders that are no longer being used. This includes any redundant installations of applications and any data that can be archived.
As files are written, read, and deleted from a disk, it is possible for them to become fragmented, which means that a disk file has different parts scattered over different areas of the disk. As files are deleted from a disk, the operating system writes new files to the newly available disk space. During this process the operating system can write different portions of a file to non-contiguous clusters, so that a single file is contained on different locations of the disk. To read a fragmented file, the operating system has to look at a record it maintains which indicates the location of the different parts of a file. This fragmentation can degrade the performance of the disk subsystem and have an impact on the overall system performance as well, especially access of the all important pagefile.
You can significantly improve disk performance by defragmenting the disk, which rewrites all files on the disk in contiguous clusters and has a pronounced impact on Windows performance. Defragmenting a disk also makes nearly all free space on the disk available in one contiguous block.
It is a good idea to defragment the disk of the system you are installing Windows 98 on, no matter the operating system type. If you have MS-DOS 6.x, you can use the DOS DEFRAG utility to defragment the disk. Other disk utilities, such as Norton Utilities and PC Tools, also include tools for defragmenting the disk. To use MS-DOS DEFRAG, exit the operating system you are running, boot into DOS, and enter DEFRAG at the prompt. After that, just follow the instructions. The process is simple, and you shouldn't have any trouble.
After you have done all of the necessary work to prepare your system, you're ready to run Setup and install Windows 98. The Setup process is almost totally automated. The following section explains the various options for running Setup and explores the different choices you will be presented with during the process.
If you are planning to install Windows 98 on a freshly formatted and partitioned hard drive and have access to a Windows 95 system, you may choose to create a Windows 95 boot floppy to initiate the installation process (a DOS boot disk will suffice as another option). The steps for doing so are as follows:
After you have the start-up disk you can boot from it and run FDISK and other DOS programs such as ATTRIB, FORMAT, SCANDISK, and CHKDSK. All of these are naturally run from the command prompt A:\. The boot disk contains several other files, as seen in Figure 2.4.
FIGURE 2.4 Boot disk contents.
From FDISK you can partition and format the drive to your specifications. Using FDISK, do the following:
5. After the format is finished, remove the boot floppy, and re-boot the system.
At this point, you have a bootable system. Because the Windows 98 installation must proceed from the distribution files located on the CD-ROM, you need to load the MS-DOS drivers, either IDE or SCSI device drivers, for the CD-ROM. After you've accomplished that you can run Setup. SETUP.EXE is in the root directory of the Windows 98 CD-ROM.
The setup process is very similar to that of Windows 95 and most Microsoft products. Setup presents you with the following common options:
There are four distinct phases to the installation process of Windows 98:
All you need to do to boot Windows 98 is power up the computer; Windows 98 boots automatically. You can, however, control the way the system boots.
Using specific function keys during the boot sequence can provide quick access to the boot options use during startup. For example, pressing F4 during display of the boot message Starting Windows 98 boots your previous version of DOS, if one exists on your system. If you want to view the list of boot options available, after booting the PC and while the Starting Windows 98 message is displaying, press F8. You should see a menu similar to the following:
1.Normal 2.Logged (\BOOTLOG.TXT) 3.Safe mode 4.Step-by-step confirmation 5.Command prompt only 6.Safe mode command prompt only 7.Previous version of MS-DOS
TIP: You can press F8, or any of the other boot function keys, any time after the PC completes its Power On Self Test (POST). You do not have to wait until you see Starting Windows 98. If your PC contains a SCSI host adapter, for example, you can press the boot function key when you see the message that indicates that the SCSI BIOS is loading.
The following list explains the options listed in the boot menu:
TIP: If you boot the system to a command prompt, you can start the GUI and full operating system by entering WIN at the command prompt.
Windows 98 doesn't require the CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT files. As a fully integrated operating system, Windows 98 detects the drivers and configuration settings and loads the appropriate drivers for the system as it boots.
If you installed Windows 98 on top of DOS, as an upgrade from Windows 3.x or Windows 95, the CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files will be present. The settings used in these files are used to set the global environment in Windows 98. AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS are used to maintain a compatible environment for any applications that require these system files to operate properly. More on this in Chapter 3.
If you do have a previous version of DOS installed on the system that is being upgraded to Windows 98, Windows 98 uses a group of system files to control the boot process. The following list explains these files:
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