The battery is horrible with 2000, I think this laptop just wasn't made for Windows 2000...
Update: I found a Windows 98 Live CD. I may be making progress! It is 12MB so I believe it just boots MS-DOS 7.1, but I can run Setup from there!
The ripoff Windows 98 Portable CD let me format C: and copy the files from my Windows 98 CD to it. I think this is real progress!
The C: drive does not boot with Windows 98's installation files on it. I will need to try something else.
lukewt1017 wrote on 2025-07-08, 03:58:The C: drive does not boot with Windows 98's installation files on it. I will need to try something else.
If you want c: to be bootable, you need to either format using
format c: /s
OR, if you do not want to reformat at this point, run
sys a: c:
while booted from the Windows installation CD.
darry wrote on 2025-07-08, 04:16:If you want c: to be bootable, you need to either format using […]
lukewt1017 wrote on 2025-07-08, 03:58:The C: drive does not boot with Windows 98's installation files on it. I will need to try something else.
If you want c: to be bootable, you need to either format using
format c: /s
OR, if you do not want to reformat at this point, run
sys a: c:
while booted from the Windows installation CD.
Uh oh, it seems I was already running format c: /s! And in DOS mode, too, which makes it super sluggish.
The PC now has MS-DOS 7.1 installed, but that's it. You can't boot to Windows, it's just MS-DOS. This is giant progress!!!
jakethompson1 wrote on 2025-07-08, 03:13:Oh, it's #2 from the first menu, then you should get a second menu with three choices.
If choosing #2 brings up the second menu in your VM, but not on real hardware, that points to a problem with the CD-ROM drive.
I have a system partition on drive C. It is just MS-DOS 7.1. Only COMMAND.COM and everything else. I can now see this when I boot from CD. So it is indeed Windows 2000 just not wanting users to downgrade...
Windows 98 is installing. This means everything worked.
For future reference, if you have the same problem as me, here was the mentioned REMOVED
Removed link to Windows 98 and named of modified copy of from above post.
