Yeah, hehe. During a Windows 9x install, it assumes that whatever hard drive partition you installed Windows to will be, by default, C:. And whatever optical media drive you installed from would naturally be D:. It sets up the Windows registry with these values. That's why EVERY SINGLE TIME you have to install a new driver, it asks to see the Windows installation CD-ROM and always ONLY checks whatever drive is D:. It specifically looks for D:\Win9x folder.
Knowing this, I did this for my older retro systems. For my Windows 95 system, I used a 20.4GB hard drive, so I made a 19GB C: partition and a 1.4GB D: partition, having changed the drive letter of my CD-ROM to R:. Then I copied my \Win95 directory from my install CD to the D: drive directly. Now, I never have to deal with that annoying "put your installation disc in the drive" crap, as the folder D:\Win95 is ALWAYS available.
For my Windows 98se gaming rig, I used a 40GB HDD, so I made a 32GB C: and an 8GB D:. Same thing, I copied \Win98 to the drive and it works the same way. I also created a folder for all the video files for Final Fantasy 7 on that D: and changed the drive letter in the system registry for that game, so the game doesn't pause every time it needs to run a movie file to wait for the CD-ROM to spin back up (the original PlayStation never stopped spinning its CD-ROM drive so it was a much smoother experience during gameplay), as well as to address that a few video files were corrupt on my first CD-ROM, but were fine on later discs, so consolidating all video files to the same folder on my HDD resolved that issue.
Anyway, if you do what I did with a D: partition and copying the CD-ROM source files over, do yourself a favor and mark that directory as Read-Only. Wouldn't want some time-travelling fruit-cake trying to alter those files so that you corrupt your installation the next time you install a driver, would we? Or heaven help us, corrupting files due to aging HDDs and failing bad sectors.
