First post, by lukewt1017
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- Newbie
The laptop I'm trying to install Windows 98 on is a Panasonic ToughBook CF-35. It does not have much documentation.
It came with Windows 95 when I first got it. Then, a few months later, I wanted to install Windows 98 on it (which I still want to do). I used an Upgrade ISO, but it got stuck on the same thing for hours and I had to choice but to mess up the Windows 95 install and abort the upgrade.
Obviously, this messed up the Windows install. Me and a friend were confused for weeks on how we could resolve the issue. The night before it was fixed, he offered to keep it over the night and just work on it and try to see if he could fix it. He ended up finding his Windows 2000 CD and installed Windows 2000 on the laptop. However, the next day, he looked in the same CD case and about right after that Win2K CD, there was a Windows 98 one. I tried to downgrade and boot from it, but Windows 2000 doesn't want you to downgrade, I guess. Unfortunately, I don't have a hard drive reader to copy files from a Windows 98 VM's hard disk or wipe the hard drive and try installing. I tried booting from a custom MS-DOS 6.22 Boot CD I found online, but it just said "Non-system Disk or disk error - Replace and press any key when ready". So I tried putting in a FreeDOS CD and pressing a key, but it would not do anything. It stayed on the same screen forever. Then, I tried rebooting with the FreeDOS CD in there. Windows 2000 began loading from the hard drive. Then, I tried to do the same thing with a PC DOS 2000 CD, which has a Bootable CD version. I would've ran Windows 98 Setup from these CDs, but they never worked. I do not have anything important on this computer, and I don't use it for business, I would prefer using it for gaming, but NTVDM sucks, DOSBox-X will run, but extremely slow because this is a 1997 laptop and is probably using it at max RAM (we upgraded it from 256 MB to 512 MB RAM). So two operating systems running at once (Win2K and DOS within DOSBox-X) is very slow, and not ideal for video games. The source ports made for Windows 2000 for the games I want to play run at about 15 FPS, and since Windows 2000 uses NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) for DOS programs, sound in games does not work right. I believe this laptop came with both an FDD and a CD-ROM drive, but somehow the previous owner got rid of the FDD. However, USB drivers don't work, and I don't have a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card, so I can't use an external FDD for booting from a Windows 98 boot disk. Should I just get a hard drive reader, or what?
