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Making Hardware Installation Easier on WIN 98

Started by Whizbang, March 30, 2004, 20:49 hrs

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Whizbang

The biggest problem I have had installing hardware on Win 98 is the inaccessability of the driver files because they are compressed in Zip files in the Windows folder of the installation CD.  After innumerable head poundings due to installation failures, I decided to extract virtually all of the driver files and related ones using WinZip to a temporary folder on my desktop for copying to a CD, all 1500 + files!

The effort seems to be worth it (if you are a masochist and enjoy torturing yourself by refusing to dump 98 for something not as vicious).  When the installation wizard wants me to pop the Win 98 CD into the drive, I comply and then insert the Cab CD after the wizard gets lost in the maze of zipped files.  It takes a little browsing to get the program to switch mind-sets and get the files from the Cab CD, but I no longer get failed installations with a muddled registry to clean up when the referenced files cannot be found during bootup.

The compressed files that need to be extracted are in
BASE5
CATALOG3
DRIVER11, 12, 13, 14, 21,
MINI,
NET7, 8, 9, 10,
PRECOPY1,
PRECOPY2.
 Add to these the dlls contained in the WIN98_# series from 22 to 69.

99% of the contained files will never be needed, but it is far easier to extract them all at one time than to search for the needed ones every time you need to do a driver/file search and then extract.

Burn the files, without a containing folder to a CD and make them readable on all CD drives.